Applied Metaphysics
Ground Truth

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being, beyond what physically appears. "Applied Metaphysics" sums up my ongoing research into the essence and mystery of things. It is partly inspired by the scuola metafisica of De Chirico that flourished at the beginning of last century and that deeply influenced visual arts and movements such as Valori Plastici (Plastic Values), Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and, later, Surrealism. "Painting that which cannot be seen" is the poetics of  the metaphysical movement. Photographing the inner, invisible essence of things is my primary concern.

The current series "Ground Truth" contains a number of images, of which the ones here are just a small selection. Ground truth generally means the absolute truth of something, and in this sense, it accurately describes the goal of this series: to show the immanent truth of things. A more interesting meaning comes from Machine Learning, a field of computer science that studies and designs computer systems that are able to learn. One application is the classification of items, where two or more classes are used to classify items and the system must produce a model that correctly assigns new items to one or more of these classes. In an initial phase, a training set is usually provided. This set contains items which were manually classified and provides a ground truth in the form of archetypal instances, from which other knowledge will be derived.

All the images in Ground Truth are very high resolution images (300+ Mpixels) that can be used for high quality prints in very large sizes (square meters). I described the rather involved capture process in an article in PetaPixel. The sheer amount of detail present in each image is fundamental for conveying the inner reality of things at a hyperrealistic level that transcends normal vision.