Symptomatic People – Siyun Sun

Symptomatic People

Cinema 4D, Photoshop; 2023.

Process

Graphic experiments in Photoshop using models from Cinema 4D.

Affective Skin: Parametric Wearables Embodying Alienation

Year: 2025

Size: 15×40×40cm

Medium: Procedural Creation in Houdini, 3D Prints in PLA Plastic with Metallic Spray Paints

A translucent 3D-printed mask, generated from parametric architectural algorithms in Houdini, hovers between body and machine. Light filters through its woven lattice, merging with the wearer’s skin to reveal shifting identities beneath a cybernetic shell. I designed this “second face” to both conceal and expose—a synthetic epidermis for psychic intimacy that transforms alienation into touch, and turns estrangement into coexistence between the organic and the digital, emotion and computation.

This exoskeleton reimagines the body’s surface as a porous interface for digital empathy. The repeated sanding and priming of each printed layer mirror the slow coevolution of matter and simulation, where every refinement blurs the boundary between what is built and what feels alive.

From Screen to Skin

Year: 2025

Size: 3D Print: 90×90×60cm; Film: 1 Minutes 49 Seconds

Medium: PLA Plastic, Digital: Houdini, Unreal Engine, Meta Quest 3

This project spans VR, sculpture, and wearable design, originating from a Newton–Leipnik strange-attractor equation I evolved into a 3D lifeform. In Unreal Engine, I built a VR world inhabited by these monumental creatures—rib-like corridors and open mouths forming a hive-like biome with no fixed ground. At our school exhibition, visitors described the experience as “beautifully unsettling,” often losing orientation and bodily boundaries.

I later 3D-printed the creature, hand-finished it with metallic pigments, and adapted it into a performative headpiece, sparking my research into digital fashion—parametric garments generated from mathematical and architectural systems—presented in a digital runway with process documentation.

The project culminated in a collaboration with filmmaker Leon Lin on Pseudosynthesis, exploring how motion capture and emotional improvisation translate movement into shifting digital identities.

Affective Skin: Parametric Wearables Embodying Alienation

Year: 2025

Size: Digital

Medium: Digital: Houdini

I developed multiple wearable variants before arriving at the final piece. Each iteration followed feedback loops that mutate and decay, echoing cellular division and systemic entropy. The resulting parametric masks evoke biomorphic fragments—anatomical residues of emotional states. Through these experiments, I visualized alienation as a biological glitch, mirroring the body’s fragility in form. Grayscale prototypes adopt the rigidity of geometric grids, while those tinted in bruised blues and greens suggest corporeal irritation and psychic fatigue.

I explore abjection—the unease of confronting one’s own materiality—by translating the familiar into estranged forms. The blue variant, displayed in a sterile white gallery, stages the tension between clinical observation and lived emotion, turning sensation itself into object. Across prototypes, I metabolize computational generation to test emotion’s resistance to clean simulation, narrating an ongoing negotiation between control and collapse, body and data, intimacy and estrangement.

Affective Skin: Parametric Wearables Embodying Alienation

Year: 2025

Size: 30×10×10cm Each

Medium: PLA Plastic; Digital: Houdini, Cinema 4D

After digital exploration, I grounded the process in material form. Using CT scan data visualizations, I reconstructed rib- and spine-like structures, 3D-printed in translucent resin. Mounted along my back, these prosthetic organs extend emotion and memory into architecture, metabolizing pain into structure.

Alienation becomes corporeal resonance when the clinical turns wearable. The back piece probes the fragile boundary between empathy and exposure, embodying the body’s negotiation with its digital double. It “corpses” the medium—revealing digital sculpture’s material mortality and allowing the real to surface through plastic seams.

Positioned at the intersection of fashion, animation, and architecture, the work becomes a breathing interface, a shifting topology that mirrors how we inhabit systems of virtual embodiment and estrangement, turning the mechanical into something almost human.

Symbiogenesis

Year: 2025

Size: 2 Minutes 32 Seconds

Medium: Digital: Houdini, After Effects, Nuke

I explore the entanglement between humans and nature through procedural plant growth, meditative spatial design, and embodied transformation. Vegetation emerging across a human avatar becomes a metaphor for porosity and dissolution of fixed identity. A photogrammetry-scanned model wears an algae-based garment, standing amid tidal waves as her body gradually transforms into a fungal tree.

Process footage documents photogrammetry capture and generative growth algorithms, revealing how digital and organic systems intertwine. Inspired by the model’s performative documentary—where she instinctively sketches memories—plant growth becomes a gesture of remembering, an archive inscribed on the body.

The animation envisions identity as fluid, symbiotic, and perpetually remade by the ecological and technological systems that sustain and reshape us.

Personal History Infographic

Year: 2024

Size: 84.1×118.9cm

Medium: Digital Painting in Adobe Illustrator Printed on Paper

Drawing from scientific diagrams and psychiatric literature, this infographic maps the intersections of knowledge, memory, and emotion across clinical and symbolic systems. A skull surrounded by duplicating cells embodies thought’s expansion, while radiating DSM-5 terminology visualizes mental states as data streams—merging anatomical illustration with psychiatric taxonomy.

Fragments from the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook and writings by Sontag and Barthes are reinterpreted as musical keys and rhythmic notations, transforming cultural constructs of illness into a sonic anatomy of cognition.

The piece oscillates between precision and unease, intellect and affect, questioning whether the quantified self can ever contain the chaos that makes us human—or if data simply becomes another mirror of our longing for coherence.

Personal History Infographic: Process

Year: 2025

Size: Digital Print: 84.1×118.9cm; 3D Print: 30×30×20cm; Zine: 21×29.7cm

Medium: PLA Plastic, Tracing Paper, LED Lights

I extended the infographic into an installation for Optical Intermediate in London, an exhibition exploring the dialogue between art and technology. A printed floor painting interacts with prismatic light that shifts as viewers move, turning observation into participation. A zine and 3D-printed book stack, derived from layers of the diagram, translate abstract data into tangible form, inviting reflection on memory, categorization, and the body’s transformation into information.

By blending narrative time with spatial analysis, the installation uses light’s interplay with translucent materials to visualize how information is encoded, decoded, and embodied. Through this responsive choreography of light, surface, and movement, viewers experience psychological and philosophical structures as living systems of perception and translation.

Graphic Novel: Lost at Sea of Mind

Year: 2022

Size: Book: 26.7×39.4cm, 197 Pages; Video: 3 Minutes

Medium: Sewn Book in Artistic Paper with Pop-Ups

Lost at Sea of Mind (ISBN: 9781639950973) is a graphic novel drawn from my lived experience of regaining stability through talk therapy. Structured in chapters, it visualizes emotional terrains—eating disorders, social anxiety, perfectionism, and the search for self—shifting from monochrome blues to full color to mirror a gradual re-emergence into balance.

The project includes storyboards, production documentation, and a flip-through of the finished book, revealing a process that merges pop-up construction, collage, and fragments of classical Chinese poetry to heighten moments of struggle and release.

The book has resonated with young readers confronting similar challenges. I later held a solo exhibition at a bookstore in China and was invited to give talks on visual storytelling and independent publishing, as well as a lecture on narrative structure at Shenzhen University, extending the work’s dialogue beyond the page into community.

Anarchitectural Habitat: Form

Year: 2025

Size: Digital

Medium: 3D Environments in Houdini, Walking Simulation Game in Unity

I often dream of drifting weightlessly yet nauseated, trapped within a fractal system with no beginning or end. Using procedural fractals, I built a recursive city in Blender that encloses two winged figures—bodies and wings following the same looping logic. Players navigate this performative architecture in Unity, oscillating between freedom and confinement.

The project reflects the void core we endlessly orbit through creation yet never reach, echoing Zhuangzi’s fable of the butterfly’s dream—whether we shape systems or they shape us. Here, the butterflies and the rhizome coexist, every façade interlinked in patterned chaos.

The avatars serve as vessels of projection, inviting viewers to inhabit their fractured perception. I mutate skin and environment so that identity refracts and desire dislocates. Through crystalline distortions, bodies dissolve into architecture, forming a liminal city where self and structure blur, and dreams resist the order that builds them.

Anarchitectural Habitat: Soft City

Year: 2025

Size: Digital

Medium: 3D Environment in Houdini

I developed an organic soft city by exploring how algorithmic systems simulate ecological growth and decay. Using procedural deformation and volumetric generation, the Soft City is a miniaturized entanglement with the Earth as a conscious creature, and a megastructure of spines and ribs that imagines viewers’ bodies at the same scale as a planet. The anatomical structure grows through fluid rules and undergoes controlled degradation, reflecting entropy and the passage of time.

There is also a process of creating the rib-like structures in Houdini (as shown in the greyscale image) and testing the composition and texture of the city.

Anarchitectural Habitat: Hard City

Year: 2025

Size:3D Print 20×15×10cm

Medium: 3D Environment in Houdini, 3D Prints in PLA Plastic

I furthered the theme by creating a sibling Hard City of more geometrical forms. This city emerges from rigid, angular repetitions. I experimented with compiling boxes in different fractal compositions to until a sense of urban planning murmurs from the decaying forms. Patterns evolve through translation and distortion, converting computational precision into tactile form. 3D-printed models of the Hard City ground digital logic in material reality; their spiked, textured surfaces invite touch as an act of inquiry. Through this haptic dialogue between system and self, matter and memory, the city transforms from a procedural construct into a living, affective organism that questions how we inhabit environments.

Anarchitectural Habitat: Dissolve

Year: 2025

Size: Digital

Medium: 3D Environment in Houdini

Using smoke and particle simulations in Houdini, I transformed ephemeral visual effects into architectural surfaces, extending earlier studies of procedural cityscapes. Central voids within each composition symbolize the unattainable Real—a space that structures meaning through absence. Drawing on Blanchot’s Awaiting Oblivion, these anti-architectural forms unfold in cyclical, liminal time, where memory and structure continuously erode and rebuild.

The instability of smoke mirrors how humans navigate uncertain systems—technological, environmental, or emotional—seeking orientation within impermanence. These anti-cities disrupt narrative linearity, replacing resolution with reflection. By materializing transience, the work proposes architecture as a medium of contemplation rather than construction, inviting viewers to reconsider presence, absence, and relationality within posthuman urban ecologies.

Rhizomatic Becoming in Deep Time: Weathered Terrains

Year: 2025

Size: Digital

Medium: Procedural Terrain Simulation in Houdini and Gaea

Using thermal and hydraulic weathering simulations informed by satellite data, I generate terrains that think in deep time. River systems connect rhizomatically, forming planets that erode, fold, and renew themselves in continuous cycles. These digital landscapes unfold like memories—slow, recursive, and resistant to linear perception.

I ask: What happens when emotion meets geology? When tears meet soil, erosion becomes empathy—a merging rather than a fracture. Through these works, I explore the dialogue between geological and psychological time, where transformation becomes an act of reflection.

The resulting terrains are affective, self-evolving environments. Here, technology operates as a sensorial medium that lets us feel the becoming of matter. Data, memory, and nature intertwine, revealing how the digital can mirror the Earth’s own slow pulse of change.

Rhizomatic Becoming in Deep Time: Erosion

Year: 2025

Size: 57 Seconds

Medium: Digital: Houdini, Gaea, Nuke

I explore geological time, memory, and posthuman perception through procedural worldbuilding. Using Gaea and Houdini, I constructed terrains from satellite-derived elevation data, simulating erosion to form landscapes that evolve in real time. The accompanying film reveals this generative process, turning geological formation into visual narrative.

Collaborating with painter Zara Poon, whose oil works evoke fragmented temporality, I translated her brushstrokes into a navigable Unreal Engine environment, treating pigment as digital terrain. The first-person experience dissolves chronological time, allowing viewers to drift through shifting spatial and emotional dimensions.

This project bridges animation, scientific modeling, and affective speculation, exploring how environments perform time—eroding, recomposing, and remembering themselves—to evoke a sensory experience of “deep time” that extends beyond human perception.

Rhizomatic Becoming in Deep Time: Geological Memory

Year: 2025

Size: Digital

Medium: Procedural Terrain Simulation in Houdini and Gaea

The folded terrains translate planetary data into meditative, grayscale abstractions inspired by Chinese landscape painting—code becomes brushstroke, erosion becomes gesture. Each topography mirrors interior life: grief, endurance, and reflection materialized as shifting form. These digital landscapes dissolve boundaries between natural and synthetic, inner and outer, self and world.

We are water, fire, wind, and cell—living in both fast-forward and retrospect. Here, simulation transforms into sensation, and data into affect, creating an introspective terrain where nature and code coalesce.

This ecology imagines a posthuman perception that exceeds the human eye, where we exist simultaneously as memory and element, water and machine. In that convergence, the digital landscape becomes a living interface—a system that senses, remembers, and transforms with us.

Swell

Year: 2025

Size: 2 Minutes 7 Seconds

Medium: Digital: Houdini, After Effects, Nuke

Swell is a procedural animation in Houdini and VR environment in Unreal Engine visualizing anxiety, compulsion, and memory through mineral and organic growth. Originating from my experience with bruxism, the project transforms grinding and self-consumption into a decaying “teeth world,” regenerating and overtaken by fungal life.

Using growth solvers and strange attractor systems, I simulated infected hyphae and branching mineral formations that loop and mutate like restless subjectivity. The work evolved into a planetary-scale VR mouth, inhabited by parasitic jaws where decay and healing coexist in claustrophobic intimacy.

By merging bodily sensation with ecological worldbuilding, I externalize the unspeakable—reframing anxiety not as pathology, but as an environment that grows, decomposes, and regenerates within us.

Imaginalgia

Year: 2025

Size: Digital

Medium: Unreal Engine Machina Fractals, Metahuman, Rokoko Motion Capture

At the core of this project is a sensation I call imaginalgia, a nostalgia for imagined versions of myself that are older, maternal, or unreachable, whose outline hangs over the present moment. I try to give form to a future-shadow leaning into now, filled with nostalgia for lives that never took place, yet shaping how the body trembles through loneliness, anxiety, and the fear of thinning out of existence.
Nausea, shaking, and the held-in cry fold these involuntary responses into a digital body. The scenes are scraps from a memory-film that was never made, caught between speculative biography and emotional excavation.

Imaginalgia

Year 2025

Size: Digital

Medium: Unreal Engine Machina Fractals, Metahuman, Rokoko Motion Capture

The process includes performance and computational distortion. I recorded my movements with a Rokoko suit of dance performance that are involuntary motions that signal anxiety: clutching the stomach and breath breaking. These captures were transferred onto a Metahuman built from the imagination of an older self and echoes of my mother, creating a figure who is both intimately familiar and impossibly distant.
Inside Unreal Engine, the Machina Fractals plugin tears the environment open with organic ruptures, mirroring the psychosomatic strain in the body. The toolchain shows how physical discomfort spills into digital space, and digital forms return as emotional doubles, which reflects my broader practice using FX, photogrammetry, and motion capture to externalize internal states in ways that sit between cinema, performance, and posthuman portraiture.

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