In this work, Sophie Kahn presents an unstable digital portrait of a woman, created with a 3D laser scanner over the course of ten minutes. The artist scanned the model three times, as she slowly turned her head, resulting in a triple ‘exposure’. The 3D scanner Kahn uses was never designed to capture the human body. When confronted with breath and motion, it breaks down, generating fragmentary results. Like a photograph, a 3d scan is made from life, in a short time and from a limited perspective. When rotated, it reveals losses and blind spots, frayed edges, and voids in the solid object that stand for all the things that the scanner cannot see.

Kahn’s work references older modernist and Futurist artworks that also question our ability ‘capture’ a moment in time - Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase, for example, or Cubist portraits (which were themselves influenced by the ways in which the technology of photography altered our way of seeing). But this piece adds a uniquely digital glitch: the various layers of the model’s face are translucent, and seem to collapse into themselves as the viewer rotates the model. In Kahn’s work, the technologies we use to capture the body seem to damage it through the act of capture, leaving behind a heap of poetic but ambiguous fragments.