Nigredo

Nigredo takes its name from alchemy: the nigredo is the blackening — the putrefaction, the dissolution that prime matter has to pass through before it can turn into anything else. Exo-genesis points the other way, to a birth that doesn't rise from within the matter but from outside the generative process, with the algorithm standing in as an external womb.

Here the plastic absorbs the graphite the way the old alchemists meant transmutation: the PLA isn't coated, it's changed. Its surface darkens until it stops looking like plastic and starts reading as mineral. The base — wood, aluminium and black volcanic lapillo — sets the form down on volcanic ground, about as original as matter gets.

The digital stone makes its descent: it blackens, it cools, it settles. No longer luminous calculation but sediment, Nigredo is matter that has crossed its own night and is finally ready to become a work.