Diss(ev)olving the Self:
Procedural De/Generation of Bodies

Diss(ev)olving the Self takes the designer’s scanned body as the starting point for a digital material investigation into the dissolution and reconfiguration of selfhood in virtual space. Through three-dimensional self-scanning, the body is externalised as geometry: a surface observed, handled, stretched, displaced, and recomposed through procedural operations.

 

A video is presented that showcases a digital body undergoing pulses of morphological change. During these intervals, the scanned figure expands, contracts, and distorts, as if its surface responded to forces not fully visible. The pulse becomes a visual and temporal device: it interrupts the stability of the body in the digital and exposes its form as contingent, programmable, and negotiable. As such, what appears as a body is never fixed; it repeatedly de/generates through algorithmic movement, mesh deformation, and shifting expression.

 

The work builds on an understanding of fashion beyond garment objects and conventional relations of wearing. Here, the body itself becomes the site through which fashion-like material transformations are enacted. The surface of the scan operates as canvas, textile, and spatial threshold at once, allowing distinctions between body, garment, and environment to become unstable. In this instability, the body is expressed as a situated sequence of becoming and dissolving.

 

Procedural design is central to this investigation because the pulsating de/generation of the body is not animated as a fixed transformation from one form to another. Rather, it is produced through parameters, modifiers, and temporal repetitions that establish the conditions through which the scanned self appears, behaves, and dissolves as digital materiality. These operations shape the body as a relational material process, where form emerges through rule-based variation beyond direct manual control. In this sense, procedural design reorganises both the design process and the perception of selfhood: the viewer is invited to encounter a body whose material intelligibility is repeatedly recalculated, destabilised, and reconstituted onscreen.

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The project was showcased as part of the Soft+Ware: Rethinking Fashion and Textiles exhibition at Textil Museet (The Textile Museum of  Sweden), Borås, between April 23rd and August 21st.​ 

 

Author: Jan Tepe