2023
Coalescence
Coalescence is a series of 3D-printed data objects that materialize the latent entanglement of cities and their environments. Curated remote sensing imagery is processed with generative neural networks and converted into layered voxel prints, allowing two-dimensional image sequences to become dense, spatial matter. The work reveals urbanization not as an isolated condition, but as a coalescing field of ecological, material, and planetary relations.
52.96 bn uniquely addressable data points
Methodologically, Coalescence treats the latent walk as a volumetric image field. Remote-sensing datasets were used to train a generative adversarial network, whose latent space makes it possible to interpolate between learned image states rather than simply compose or collage them. In these transitions, urban fragments, vegetation, terrain, and spectral residues do not appear as separate categories, but as continuous transformations, revealing correlations and interferences that remain difficult to perceive in a single map or satellite view.
Selected sequences from this latent walk were then translated directly into voxel data for PolyJet printing. Instead of modeling form through conventional geometry, each frame became an ultra-thin bitmap slice in a vertically stacked print sequence, with color, opacity, and material variation resolved through voxel-level dithering and multimaterial deposition at the printer’s native resolution. Voxel printing has been described as a way of fabricating data directly across volumetric space, and in Coalescence that capacity becomes epistemic as much as technical: once the latent walk is stacked into depth, the object no longer reads as a single image but as a condensed section through many possible spatial states. What usually remains hidden in computation—the gradual transitions, compressions, and latent affiliations within the dataset—emerges here as density, blur, translucency, and internal spatial interference.
Credits
Commissioned for the Resilienza Festival at Serre dei Giardini Margherita, Bologna, Italy, curated by Nicoletta Tranquillo / Kilowatt.
in collaboration with Stratasys Ltd.
Publication
Convoluted City: The latent space as tangible matter in HABITS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE