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

This project 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.

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The project resulted in a video that presents 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. What appears as a body is therefore never fixed; it repeatedly de/generates through algorithmic movement, mesh deformation, and shifting expression.

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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 but expressed as a situated sequence of becoming and dissolving.

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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 is showcased as part of the Soft+Ware exhibition at Textile Museum Sweden, Borås between April 23rd and August 21st.​ The exhibition catalogue will be published in August 2026.

 

Author: Jan Tepe