FASCiATIO
Film
2024
VEX expression language
3D
FASCiATIO is a visual exploration of self-destruction as a paradoxical engine; both an act of collapse and a condition for creation. The project approaches breakdown not as failure, but as a process of transformation: messy, involuntary, and sometimes necessary.
The title refers to fasciation, a rare genetic mutation in flowering plants that produces warped, unbounded growth. These distorted blooms, neither fully stable nor entirely broken, act as a visual and conceptual anchor. Their malformed beauty echoes the central premise: that distortion, when left unchecked, can generate form as much as it dismantles it.
Rather than designing fixed outcomes, the project constructs a living system — a set of procedural rules written in VEX and deployed in Houdini. These scripts behave as digital DNA, encoding instability, excess, and deviation into synthetic organisms. As the simulations unfold, growth breaks loose from constraint, producing forms that mutate, rupture, and reconfigure in real time.
Control is traded for conditions. The role of the designer shifts: no longer shaping outputs, but engineering potential. Through procedural logic and controlled unpredictability, FASCiATIO models a digital organism in flux. It is both an image of decay and a rehearsal for renewal — a generative system where destruction becomes a means of becoming.
The title refers to fasciation, a rare genetic mutation in flowering plants that produces warped, unbounded growth. These distorted blooms, neither fully stable nor entirely broken, act as a visual and conceptual anchor. Their malformed beauty echoes the central premise: that distortion, when left unchecked, can generate form as much as it dismantles it.
Rather than designing fixed outcomes, the project constructs a living system — a set of procedural rules written in VEX and deployed in Houdini. These scripts behave as digital DNA, encoding instability, excess, and deviation into synthetic organisms. As the simulations unfold, growth breaks loose from constraint, producing forms that mutate, rupture, and reconfigure in real time.
Control is traded for conditions. The role of the designer shifts: no longer shaping outputs, but engineering potential. Through procedural logic and controlled unpredictability, FASCiATIO models a digital organism in flux. It is both an image of decay and a rehearsal for renewal — a generative system where destruction becomes a means of becoming.
FASCiATIO
Publication
2024
115 x 215 mm
56 pages
Inkjet print
Documentation of the conceptual and visual foundation for the FASCiATIO film. The publication maps the conceptual groundwork of the project in five sequences, combining personal writing, scientific reference, and visual design. At its core is the idea of existential mutation — a term coined to explore self-destruction as a condition for transformation. Using the botanical mutation fasciation as a central metaphor, the publication examines how identity, growth, and collapse can be modelled through both narrative structure and generative design processes.