THREE-DIMENSIONAL VENDING

MICHELLE HESSEL’S HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

When Brazil native Michelle Hessel was going to school in New York City, she started noticing how many street vendors were selling food, “one literally on every corner,” she recalled. Then she had an idea. She asked the vendor who sold her coffee every morning if she could make a digital portrait of him. He agreed, even when she said, “What I need to do is take about 500 pictures of you and about a thousand pictures of your cart.”

The result was her 2016 online piece Meet Adam, which was sort of a prototype for her more dimensional work Hidden in Plain Sight, featured in Currents. “For both Meet Adam and this one, to get the 3D scans I used photogrammetry. You take a bunch of pictures from every possible angle and stitch them together with a software program called PhotoScan.” The challenge was to generate highquality 3D models “with a lot of the textural quality of the real object.” For Hidden in Plain Sight, she decided to bring the work into the real world by 3D-printing the vendors and their colorful carts.

When she found out that Adam was an immigrant from Morocco, she did research and learned that 90 percent of the city’s street vendors are immigrants. “New York has people from all over the world, and it’s what makes the city so magical, is that it has diversity. I wanted to tell the stories of this immigrant community. I learned there’s a whole black market to sell food on the streets. The City of New York has about 4,000 permits for people to sell food on the street but there about 20,000 people selling the food on the streets. What happens is that people with permits pay the city about $800 for two years, but then they rent the permit to somebody else for as much as $20,000. It’s a crazy situation and the city hasn’t increased permits since the 1980s.”

The new piece is based on three vendors: Thiru is from Sri Lanka, Ana is from Ecuador, and Dany is from Morocco. The miniature sculptures include audio interviews that are triggered by visitors, who can hear the vendors’ stories in their own voices. For the Dany sculpture, Hessel added another layer: visuals projected on top of the cart.

“Dany’s story is about coming to America with a dream of what life would be like, which is very different from what he has now,” she said. “Ana’s story is about the black market. She has been selling food for 15 years without a permit. But I didn’t want all the stories to be sad. Thiru’s story is very positive. He’s very famous. He has been featured in newspapers and on TV. Every day there’s a line to get his food. There is also beauty in being a street vendor and he has some pretty amazing things to say about it.”

“Most of my projects have some sort of nonfiction storytelling related to them,” said Hessel, who was born in São Paulo and is a post-doctoral research resident in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. “I try to pick a topic and then figure out what technology will allow me to tell the story in the best way that will allow users to engage with this content in a way they never did before.” — Paul Weideman

“Dany’s story is about coming to America with a dream of what life would be like, which is very different from what he has now.” — artist Michelle Hessel