The Infection series is an exploration into how invisible and virtual forces influence our visible and physical everyday lives.
Capsule-like shapes are prevalent in the graphic and industrial design nowadays. Shiny, crisp, gentle and rounded shapes have surrounded our virtual environments (websites, apps UI, infographics, CG art, etc.) for the most part of 2010’s-2020’s - a friendly facade for the complex system of interconnections that is the web. Like the pretty colors that a fungal infection might display from the outside, systems of aggregation and emergence can look deceivingly beautiful and familiar. Yet their inner workings are impossible to fully comprehend or visualize.
In the sculptures, cold and virtual looking capsules are arranged into patterns reminiscent of a primordial sense of natural growth, and clustered onto biological-looking substrates. They evoke the abstract yet detailed landscapes of cells, spores and tissues seen through a Scanning electron microscope.
The concept of infection is evoked as a continuous struggle between growth and entropy - both at the microscopic scale and at the cosmic scale, both in the physical world and in the virtual world.
This approach takes inspiration from how virality (both as a biology-related concept and an internet-related concept), and intangible forces in general, shape our everyday lives.
Infection-Assemblage is the most complex iteration of the Infection series - outlining a comparison between virtual reality and physical objects. It is driven by Deleuze’s concept of Assemblage, and Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory. Assemblages are a combination of heterogeneous parts (materials, textures, patterns) that is assembled into a coherent object, whilst maintaining each own’s identity.
The natural imperfections given by the material and the fabrication process (resin & concrete cast of a 3d printed original pattern) materialize the 3d model into a unique iteration of itself at this specific time. I will continue to create, modify, add/subtract, distort new parts from the same 3d pattern and create new iterations of it - a testimony of the timeless nature of 3d virtual space versus physical reality.
