Form and Fracture

Cycles of Emergence and Decay

Humbi Song
DDes 2027
Isabelle Lee
MDes Ecologies 2026
Benedetta Zuccarelli
MDes Ecologies 2025
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1 Traces of growth and glimmers of decay embodied in fragile forms

What is life, but an endless cycle of becoming and decaying? We ascend and collapse, emerge and decay – from our past, and into our future. In this simulation, the movements of one person's hand controls the creation of the crystalline forms -- determining its height, width, and degree of twist. The movements of the other person's hand controls the crystalline forms' disintegration into pixels, but only within a circular area of influence. Throughout time, one hand creates and the other destroys.

Starting with a base grid of a 2D surface, it was transformed to a 2.5 surface by growing crystalline forms. The movement data of person 1 controls the box dimensions, corresponding to the distance between the point of Person 1’s hand to the point on the grid. The further away points are from Person 1’s movements, the lower and wider the box. The closer the points on the grid are, the taller and thinner the boxes. Person 2’s point controls the vicinity where points within the circumference of the circle are separated. As Person 2 moves around the grid field, they begin to pixelate the twisted forms created by the movements of Person 1.

Project video
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2 The ritual of creation and destruction
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3 A form suspended in time
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4 Crystalline artefacts