Algorithmic Forming:
Reshaping Bodily Surfaces as Architectural Sites
2026
Artistic Output
Design Exploration
The body is perhaps the most intimate space we inhabit, yet much of it remains unavailable to us. In The Absent Body (1990), Drew Leder describes the visceral interior as recessive. It sustains embodied existence while withdrawing from direct perception. We live from within the body without being able to encounter that interior as a space before us.
Algorithmic Forming turns this condition inside out. A three-dimensional scan records the body from its exterior, translating visible surfaces into computational geometry. Yet once rendered digitally, these surfaces can be spatially reversed. The animation crosses their boundary and enters what the scan itself never captured. An interior emerges where Leder describes bodily experience as recessive, although this is no recovered interior of the physical body. It is an inwardness computationally produced from its exterior trace.
The body’s boundary is further destabilised by what the scan absorbs. Skin and clothing are registered together, allowing textile folds, bodily contours, and spaces between garment and body to form a continuous computational envelope. Clothing no longer simply surrounds the body. Cloth and flesh become co-constitutive of an architecture in which a fold becomes a corridor, a shoulder an overhang, and their encounter a spatial condition belonging fully to neither.
Leder’s recessive body, therefore, remains unresolved in this work. Digitalisation does not make the anatomical interior present. Rather, it constructs another interior in its place, generated through surfaces, algorithms, and the contingent geometries of body and dress.
What emerges is an alternative form of inwardness: an architecture beginning precisely where the embodied interior withdraws.
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
