_ timeslicer
tag: [work] [automavision] [phygital] [digi]
date: 20240112
classification: autostereoscopic 3D LED
location: Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li Chengdu China
collaborator: FlintArt
TimeSlicer is an autostereoscopic 3D LED public art project that documents a local temple during its dismantling, treating disappearance itself as a form of architectural information. Rather than reconstructing only an idealized architectural object, the project records the temporary systems that accompany its removal: scaffolding, provisional beams and columns, construction envelopes, exposed assemblies, and surrounding site conditions.
The digital construction is assembled from material and architectural components scanned piece by piece on site during deconstruction. Columns, dougong bracket sets, roof components, structural members, scaffolding, temporary supports, and other elements are individually captured as they become exposed or removed, then reconstructed within a shared digital environment. The resulting architecture is therefore not modeled retrospectively from drawings or approximated after the building has disappeared. It is constructed from spatial records of the actual material pieces encountered on site.
This creates an inverse relationship between the physical and digital architectures. As the temple is progressively taken apart, its components migrate from material construction into scanned information and are reassembled digitally. Physical deconstruction and digital construction proceed in opposite but interdependent directions: the disappearance of the building generates the information through which its digital counterpart accumulates.
The resulting model does not represent the temple at a singular moment in time. Instead, it contains successive states of exposure, removal, scanning, and reconstruction. The temple can therefore be encountered simultaneously as an intact building, an exposed assembly, a collection of material fragments, a system of temporary supports, and an accumulating digital construction.
During dismantling, architectural elements such as stylobates, columns, dougong bracket sets, and roof systems are physically framed and supported by scaffolding. These temporary structures are typically understood as secondary to architecture and disappear once their task is complete. Yet their dimensions, positions, and sequences respond directly to the building they support. In TimeSlicer, scaffolding consequently becomes an architectural index: a provisional structure through which the proportions, assembly logic, and transformation of the temple can be read.
During dismantling, architectural elements such as stylobates, columns, dougong bracket sets, and roof systems are physically framed and supported by scaffolding. These temporary structures are typically understood as secondary to architecture and disappear once their task is complete. Yet their dimensions, positions, and sequences respond directly to the building they support. In TimeSlicer, scaffolding consequently becomes an architectural index: a provisional structure through which the proportions, assembly logic, and transformation of the temple can be read.
The project extends this attention to other temporary systems of construction and deconstruction. Beams, supports, platforms, envelopes, and scaffolding are documented alongside permanent architectural components rather than removed from the reconstructed image. What conventional preservation might regard as obstruction becomes evidence of how architecture is assembled, supported, repaired, transformed, and ultimately taken apart.
This accumulated information is navigated through a custom Automavision interface. Rather than presenting the reconstructed temple through a stable and comprehensive viewpoint, a virtual camera slices through architectural strata and successive temporal states. Permanent and temporary structures overlap, disappear, and reappear as the camera moves through the digital construction. Seeing becomes an act of partial disclosure rather than total representation.
The circumstances of the commission made this temporal relationship particularly immediate. TimeSlicer was commissioned for the public LED screens at Sino-Ocean Taikoo Li Chengdu, directly adjacent to the temple itself. While the work was being developed, the physical temple was simultaneously being dismantled as part of the site’s transformation. The project therefore did not document an architecture that had already disappeared. Documentation, physical deconstruction, and digital construction occurred simultaneously.
Scanning followed the sequence of dismantling. As material components were exposed and removed on site, they were individually captured and transferred into the digital construction. The physical temple therefore diminished as its digital counterpart accumulated. For a brief period, the two existed simultaneously in inverse states—one being taken apart while the other was being assembled.
Once the physical temple had been fully dismantled, its digital reconstruction continued to occupy the adjacent LED display. The screen consequently shifted from a commercial media surface into a temporary site of architectural memory. What disappeared materially persisted as a digital presence within the same urban field from which it had been removed.
Scanning followed the sequence of dismantling. As material components were exposed and removed on site, they were individually captured and transferred into the digital construction. The physical temple therefore diminished as its digital counterpart accumulated. For a brief period, the two existed simultaneously in inverse states—one being taken apart while the other was being assembled.
Once the physical temple had been fully dismantled, its digital reconstruction continued to occupy the adjacent LED display. The screen consequently shifted from a commercial media surface into a temporary site of architectural memory. What disappeared materially persisted as a digital presence within the same urban field from which it had been removed.
Yet TimeSlicer does not propose digital reconstruction as a substitute for the lost building. A scan cannot preserve architecture in its entirety, nor can a digital model reverse demolition. Instead, the project asks what forms of architectural information become visible precisely while architecture is disappearing. Temporary supports, incomplete assemblies, exposed joints, construction sequences, material fragments, and traces of labor—conditions normally excluded from the finished image of architecture—become part of its record.
Preservation is therefore understood not as freezing architecture into an idealized and timeless object, but as recording its transformations. The temple is treated as a temporal and material condition produced through assembly, occupation, maintenance, support, dismantling, and disappearance. Its digital counterpart similarly remains an accumulation of pieces, states, and procedures rather than a seamless replacement for what has been lost.
TimeSlicer ultimately operates less as a digital monument than as a temporal instrument. It slices through architecture and time to reveal that a building’s history resides not only in the form that survives, but also in the material pieces, temporary structures, labor, transformations, and absences through which that form comes into—and passes out of—existence.