Topography / 2021–present
Alexander Porter: spatial documentary and volumetric filmmaking
Place Becomes Protagonist Topography
01 / 12
Alexander Porter is an Emmy Award-winning immersive director and visual artist who makes spatial documentaries with photogrammetry and volumetric capture. He co-founded Scatter and helped develop Depthkit. He now co-leads Topography with Hannah Jayanti. His work on Zero Days VR contributed to its News & Documentary Emmy. He began teaching graduate students at NYU ITP in 2014 and later taught at Johns Hopkins University from 2022 to 2025.
Recent Experiments
A loose feed of screenshots, prototypes, tests, and small studies from work in progress.
Strata / Installation
Strata Installation — visitor within dark scanned terrain
A 2026 visualization testing how movement can reveal scanned terrain, recorded walks, and documentary layers inside the developing installation.
See project ↗
Smooth Blair Witch
Smooth Blair Witch — LARPA screening documentation
A full-length stabilization experiment: every shot of The Blair Witch Project moves across a widened canvas, gradually painting the forest around it.
See project ↗Selected work
Documentary projects and the systems they require
The pages below follow projects into the systems they demanded: cameras, scans, reconstructed worlds, live edits, workshops, and public gatherings.
01 / Current practice
Landscapes across forms
Topography and its related works move the same documentary research through film, performance, installation, and spatial systems.
Topography
A multi-format documentary project exploring the histories and futures of land use.
Director / Producer / Virtual Cinematographer
TouringStrata / Performance
A live-edited documentary performance constructed inside a fifty-meter 3D scan of the Badlands.
Director / Producer / Performer / 3D Capture
Strata / Installation
Strata is an immersive installation that transforms the Badlands of South Dakota into an explorable landscape.
Director / Producer / Virtual Cinematographer
02 / Films / Experiences / Tools
Built through production
Finished works and continuing tools in which filmmaking, software, and spatial production developed together.
Truth or Consequences
A speculative documentary about a small desert town, a spaceport, and the people who live there.
Co-Writer / VFX Creative Director / Photogrammetry Lead
Blackout
A generative volumetric documentary that places the viewer among real New Yorkers whose inner monologues surface during a subway blackout.
Director / Project Creator
Scatter · Co-Founder / Immersive Director
Depthkit / Tool
Depthkit turns a depth-sensing camera into an accessory for an HD video camera. The two cameras record color and shape together, so a person can be rephotographed from another angle after the shoot. James George and I began with RGBDToolkit, released publicly in 2012, then rebuilt the workflow as Depthkit in 2014. Artists carried it into documentaries, virtual reality, performance, visual effects, installations, and live concerts.
Co-Creator
Depthkit · Co-Founder / Chief Product Officer
Zero Days VR
A twelve-minute immersive documentary using volumetric performance, spatial environments, and data visualization to make invisible infrastructure perceptible.
Executive Producer / Co-Writer / Depthkit DP
Scatter · Co-Founder / Immersive Director
03 / Selected commissions
Commissioned collaborations
Projects where I was invited into another artist’s, director’s, or client’s work to solve a specific visual, technical, or experiential problem.
KFC: 11 Secrets
An alternate-reality campaign that sent audiences from a Matty Matheson film into codes, hidden websites, real locations, and the mythology of KFC’s secret recipe.
Creative Director / Puzzle-System Design
Timberland X Stüssy Interactive
A WebGL experience for the 2013 Stüssy for Timberland boot, with rotation moving the captured figures from glass-like surfaces into disintegration.
Director of Photography / VFX Supervisor / Interaction Designer
04 / Workshops / Experiments
Questions made tangible
Teaching and speculative formats that turn technological questions into shared prompts, prototypes, and public experiments.
Exquisite
A family of collaborative scanning workshops that turned museums and city blocks into explorable, collectively authored worlds.
Creative Lead / Workshop Designer
Scatter · Co-Founder / Immersive Director
Computational Portraiture
Using machine vision for portraiture.
Student work shown: Collaborative Self Portraits by Rosalie Yu and Alon Chitayat.Co-Instructor / Course Designer
Camera of the Future
In a world where every device can see, what is a camera?
Workshop Co-Lead / Curator
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Learning Lab: Mars Base
An immersive educational environment offering dynamic course topics on demand.
Project Lead
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Fitzania
A tracked, glowing orb turned a preventive-health check into a game for the Museum of Future Government Services.
Physical Design Lead
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Working details
Look closely
Mirrors, cut acrylic, sensor mounts, and improvised performances show how each project found its form.
01A moth in a relay becomes a cabinet of software creatures.Curio Aquarium↗02Three cameras learn to see through mirrors.Calibrating Through Mirrors↗03Hundreds of handmade mounts turn two sensors into one camera.Depthkit Camera Mounts↗04A laser-cut mirror teaches an iPhone to look sideways.SlyPhone↗05Bill Frisell improvises against projected footage.Improvising A Film Score↗
What others saw
Reviews, interviews, and institutional accounts catch the work from another angle.
“This speculative framing, an improvised soundtrack by guitar maestro Bill Frisell, and Alexander Porter’s evocative photogrammetry all contribute to a singular, beautiful and immersive nonfiction work.”— Mandy Rose, Immerse News
“I saw the metal pole in VR and I grabbed it in real life. It was so natural, and so simple a gesture, but it put me right in that car mentally.”— Kelly Ohannessian, UploadVR
“Zero Days VR is one of the most powerful VR documentaries that I've seen so far.”— Kent Bye, Voices of VR
“Depthkit has really been on the frontier… pioneers helping to disperse these technologies into different layers of the culture.”— Kent Bye, Voices of VR
“The piece is a surprisingly innovative project, where volumetric filmmaking reaches ambitious levels.”— Agnese Pietrobon, XRMust
Stories
Long Story Long
One story traces the cameras and software that led from RGBDToolkit to Depthkit. The other follows four early experiments with depth images.
01A new kind of story required rethinking the cameraDepthkit grew through an artist-led feedback loop between production and software, making it possible to record people as moving three-dimensional images with a compact camera rig.↗02Five experiments toward a spatial cameraFrom 2011 to 2014, five RGB+D experiments took place in a subway station, on film sets, at Art Hack Day, and inside a public photobooth.↗
Practice lenses
Recurring questions
Each lens connects projects that share a way of working. A project may appear under several.
Visualizing the Unseen
Documentary forms that give perceptible shape to infrastructure, memory, landscape, and private experience inside public systems.
Systems Built Through Production
Capture rigs, virtual cameras, story engines, and live-editing systems built to solve specific production problems, then carried into later work.
Questions Made Tangible
Teaching and speculative formats that turn technological questions into shared prompts, prototypes, and public experiments.
Structures for Gathering
Festivals, seminars, and participatory worlds that create conditions for people to gather and for knowledge to circulate among them.
Reconstruction from What's Missing
Projects that rebuild places and records from partial evidence: a town assembled from documentary footage, a home removed during park reclamation, a trail mapped from oral history, or a room inferred from paintings.
Documentary / spatial practice
I like to bend photogrammetry, volumetric capture, computer vision and game technologies toward stories of place, memory, power, and ecology.
The work includes films, live performance, installation, interactive media, software, creative tools and workshops.
I love collaborating and take on commissions and consulting projects.