_ stir the pot
tag: [metariallab] [phygital] [digi]
date: 20220427
classification: 2022 Virginia Tech School of Arch + Design Award
location: Blacksburg Virginia USA
team: Yixuan Cai
weight: 97,071 kb
We were invited to develop the graphic identity for the 2022 Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design Award. The project begins with figures from John Hejduk’s Victims, originally designed for the 1984 Prinz Albrecht Palais competition in Berlin.
Rather than reproducing Hejduk’s objects as fixed geometric artifacts, the figures are digitally simulated, inflated, softened, and reassigned new material identities. Their original austerity gives way to forms that are strange, playful, and unstable. Computational processes are used not to clarify the objects, but to push them away from their inherited formal logic.
Rather than reproducing Hejduk’s objects as fixed geometric artifacts, the figures are digitally simulated, inflated, softened, and reassigned new material identities. Their original austerity gives way to forms that are strange, playful, and unstable. Computational processes are used not to clarify the objects, but to push them away from their inherited formal logic.
Hejduk described Victims as “a construction of time,” and temporality becomes a central material in the project. Each object is treated as something capable of accumulating, exchanging, and mutating attributes across a simulated duration. Like ingredients being stirred together, forms originating nearly forty years earlier begin to overlap, recombine, and circulate through new material conditions.
Each graphic scene is extracted from a single frame of an ongoing animation. The images therefore do not represent finished compositions, but temporary conditions within a larger process. Individual objects may appear autonomous, yet each remains connected to a continuous sequence of transformations before and after the captured moment.
The project treats graphic identity as a temporal sample rather than a fixed image: a moment in which historical form, digital simulation, material misbehavior, and visual representation briefly settle before changing again.
