The Beyond project was designed by Ned Daniels as part of PAACADEMY‘s “INFINIUM Studio” with Studio Chantal Matar. INFINIUM was an art and architecture project aimed to promote independent thought and symbiosis in art, digital craft, and architecture. The INFINIUM Studio aimed to design a pavilion as the project’s shell to demonstrate the importance of upholding a balance between the art-digital-architecture relationship, particularly in this ever-evolving digital space.
Mandelbulbs, attractors, and trails remain sown into the digital realm, their illumination and movement indicating cybernetic occupancy within the faux environment. Augmented with vast fractals that further the abstraction of the landscape, ‘beyond’ subverts a sense of familiarity and personal context with the beauty of infinite mathematical generation.
The product of an online studio dictated by its iterative development, both intentions and outcomes of ‘beyond’ evolved in response to recurrent procedural experimentation and a digital reconnaissance into the fractal forums archives.
Ultimately, the experience was guided by both the creation and exploration of an artificial landscape. Generated in Houdini, the foundations of the environment were pulled from a large stretch of shoreline in which low tide had left a beautiful but fleeting topography of coastal erosion. Exaggerating the Z axis emphasized such terrain, canyons, and ripples, further supplemented by procedural generation to establish biome diversity. It was bringing the terrain into Unreal that provided such a palpable sense of scale – topological intricacies providing countless hours of exploration.
It is this experience of discovery that was sought to be shared with the viewer, the placement of artefacts within natural and “curated” scenes acting as an incentive for exploration. A flying mechanic was implemented to aid such navigation; the artefacts were positioned across various biomes. Icelandic inspirations were chosen for their tangible but surreal appearance, the black sand beaches, twisted glaciers, and mossy outcrops conveying a strong sense of identity and atmosphere.
