_ 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 design the graphic identity for the 2022 Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design Award.
The objects depicted in the graphic are drawn from John Hejduk’s Victims, his entry for the 1984 Prinz Albert Palais competition in Berlin for the construction of a memorial park. These figures, often described as “little monsters,” were digitally simulated and inflated, allowing them to depart from their original geometric rigidity and austere formal language. With the assistance of computational processes, the objects gradually transform into something strange, playful, and occasionally unpredictable, revealing qualities that are both unexpected and distinctive.
Hejduk described Victims as “a construction of time,” with several structures explicitly embodying temporal mechanisms such as the clock turntable, the pendulum, and the cantilevered hourglass. In this project, time itself becomes a manipulable design dimension. Through a process akin to a honey dipper stirring disparate ingredients, objects originating from nearly forty years ago begin to exchange attributes, recombine, and circulate within newly assigned material identities.
Each graphic scene is extracted from a single frame of a simulated animation. Rather than representing a fixed moment, the images function as temporal samples. Timelessness dissolves, replaced by overlapping durations compressed into visible form. While individual outcomes may appear surprising or even unsettling, they remain connected within a continuous, extended timeline. What emerges is a collective condition, one in which everything exists simultaneously, everywhere, all at once, and with everyone.
The objects depicted in the graphic are drawn from John Hejduk’s Victims, his entry for the 1984 Prinz Albert Palais competition in Berlin for the construction of a memorial park. These figures, often described as “little monsters,” were digitally simulated and inflated, allowing them to depart from their original geometric rigidity and austere formal language. With the assistance of computational processes, the objects gradually transform into something strange, playful, and occasionally unpredictable, revealing qualities that are both unexpected and distinctive.
Hejduk described Victims as “a construction of time,” with several structures explicitly embodying temporal mechanisms such as the clock turntable, the pendulum, and the cantilevered hourglass. In this project, time itself becomes a manipulable design dimension. Through a process akin to a honey dipper stirring disparate ingredients, objects originating from nearly forty years ago begin to exchange attributes, recombine, and circulate within newly assigned material identities.
Each graphic scene is extracted from a single frame of a simulated animation. Rather than representing a fixed moment, the images function as temporal samples. Timelessness dissolves, replaced by overlapping durations compressed into visible form. While individual outcomes may appear surprising or even unsettling, they remain connected within a continuous, extended timeline. What emerges is a collective condition, one in which everything exists simultaneously, everywhere, all at once, and with everyone.
