virtual (im)material is a digital world co-created with MC Vigilate that explores dichotomies of decomposition / composition, material / immaterial, threadedness / glitch.

The scene objects were 3D scanned from natural specimens in the RISD Nature Lab using an Occipital Structure Sensor and imported into Unity. The landscape terrain was scanned from a hand-constructed textile, transforming stitches into pixels and fabric folds into hills. This subversion of scale invites users to encounter familiar objects through a lens of estrangement and discovery. Dynamic fractal texture mapping adds sensory complexity to obscure the objects’ original forms. The Unity environment is interactive, with elements such as music, texture, object physics, lighting, and fog responding to the user’s movements.

We did not aim to achieve seamless believability nor realistic representation, but rather a distinctly digital space that emphasizes abstraction and otherworldliness. We embrace the glitch as both a reminder of our earthly origins and a marker of the imperfect translation between realms.

Our worlding process is a mode of decomposition: compressing subjective sensory forms into discrete parametrized geometries. Yet it is simultaneously an act of composition: transforming static time and place bound objects into dynamic assemblages. The representation of the objects become an experience separate from their tactile embodiment, unrecognizable yet born of the same seed.

The Unity environment was exhibited for Digital Worlding: Terraforming Future, Fact, Fiction, and Fabulation at Brown University in an installation that included the physical source materials and original music. Projection of the virtual world onto the original textile completed a full cycle of physical-to-digital-to-physical translation.