Love Island is a reality television show in which British 20-somethings spend eight weeks looking for love in a Spanish villa, isolated from the rest of the world. In the first episode of each season, the contestants couple up with other islanders they deem the most “fit”. The couples’ “Love Island experiences” are subject to the public’s vote, the temptation of new contestants, and infighting between islanders. It is a show that famously deteriorates participants’ mental health, perpetuates gender stereotypes, and promotes very specific ideas of beauty. At the same time, it is a collection of stories about personal development, nuanced conflict resolution, and friendship.
The digital sculptures in The Villa: A Love Island Publication are monuments to Love Island season 4 (the best season), created by feeding thousands of video stills from the show into photogrammetry software.1 This software creates 3D objects by scanning the images and interpreting shape, depth, and color.2 Because the subjects of these scans move around the villa, jump into the pool, and gesticulate unpredictably as they talk, the program receives conflicting information and spits out wildly inaccurate and warped models, in which figures and architecture blend together.
This software is largely used by museums to create photorealistic scans of objects from their collections, or by Google Maps to generate three-dimensional maps of places. These processes, in the interest of accuracy, attempt to eliminate time as a factor. The Villa is an outlier in its attempt to capture not only the people, but also the moments from the show. My scans take place during important conversations—the first time the winning couple meet, the last dates the islanders go on before leaving the Villa, a challenge in which contestants spit food into each others’ mouths. This project deals with memory, what things are preserved and what things are lost in the retelling of a moment.
Reality television has a kind of magic to it and a language that is built through familiarity. A friend spoke about how she watches The Real Housewives of New York City and how surreal it is that, if you want, you could just go to the restaurant on the ground floor of The Regency in Manhattan where notable blowout fights from the show have taken place.
In this way, reality television occupies a space between the authentic and the simulated, presenting a synthesized version of reality that takes place in real spaces and has real-world consequences. Some islanders have married their partners from the show or carried grudges into the real world. Real Housewives’ Luann and her husband really got divorced after he was caught kissing other women at the Regency.3
Love Island, as opposed to Real Housewives, takes place in an isolated villa.4 When islanders are given the rare chance to leave the Villa, no members of the public are shown on camera. Couples traverse empty beaches and vacant streets. But this space between the authentic and the simulated is filled by a specific lexicon that has emerged over the years. Due to limited space and privacy, the islanders must ask to “pull you for a chat” if they want to speak outside of a group setting. The islanders also usually have several days between recoupling ceremonies, so they have to “graft” to solidify their respective relationships with love interests. Phrases like these have been around since the first season and gained popularity among contestants due to the show’s structure and the nature of the confined architecture.
The Villa was largely inspired by the music video for musician Holly Herndon’s song “Chorus.”5 For this video, Herndon and director Akihiko Taniguchi asked friends to take hundreds of photos of their cluttered workspaces. Using photogrammetry software, these workspaces (often home desks) are translated into virtual spaces that are explored in detail throughout the duration of the song.
The Villa was inspired by how Herndon and Taniguchi brought emerging technologies into the everyday, examining our living spaces using the same tools as a museum. The video sparked a curiosity in me about what could be scanned and what was on public display to be “captured” as an object. This book is just as much about reality television as it is about diving into the inner workings of photogrammetry as a program.
Making this book fundamentally changed my relationship to Love Island season 4. I watched the show like a computer, breaking it down into its constituent parts and harvesting data from it. I had to rewatch the show, trying to find pivotal scenes and moments that featured many different camera angles to form a good set of data for photogrammetry software. When watching new seasons of the show I have noticed myself thinking “that would make a good model.”