Taupe Magazine, 2024
Role: Concept, Visual Design
Contribution to the second edition of Taupe Magazine, an independent platform for design research. The edition's theme, "As Above, So Below," drew on ideas around natural networks, digital ecosystems, healing and interconnection. My response focused on aquariums: environments where living things are arranged purely for how they look together, regardless of whether they'd naturally coexist. Starting from photographs taken in zoo aquariums, the images were cut apart by colour and reassembled as 3D collages, layering the fragments into new compositions. The method echoes the subject: arranging elements based on visual logic rather than natural belonging. Made with Houdini and Redshift.
Published in Taupe Magazine
Each aquarium photograph is colour-segmented in Houdini. The system traces contour boundaries per colour region.
Each colour region becomes its own piece of geometry, with colour sampled from the region boundaries. The pieces keep their UVs from the original image, so the photograph can be mapped back on as a texture.
Once separated, the pieces are scattered, scaled, and placed procedurally in 3D space. Creating compositions ranging from dense clusters to sparse arrangements.
The shading blends raw colour values with the photographic texture, so the pieces shift between soft, blurred colour and sharp photographic detail.
