The material follows the building
Down to the millimetre. Every window, every cornice, every pilaster is respected. The architecture stays sovereign, the light underlines it and tells its story.
Hylémorph is the process I have developed over the years to craft the luminous materials projected in video mapping: living video matter, in permanent transformation, produced with current generative methods and composed with the real geometry of the building until the two become one.
Hylémorph comes from two Greek words: hulê, matter, and morphê, form.
Aristotle held that nothing exists as pure matter or as pure form. A thing is always both at once, inseparably. A statue is neither the marble nor the drawing in the sculptor’s mind: it is the moment when the two hold together. And he applied this to what nature makes as much as to what art makes. This is what we call hylomorphism.
The light I craft is nothing without the surface that receives it, and that surface only becomes the work because this particular light settles on it. For the time of the projection, there is only one object. You can no longer tell whether the building carries the image, or the image reveals the building.
These are not videos in the usual sense. No shots, no editing, no loop repeating itself.
They are living materials. They transform continuously, they never pass twice through exactly the same point, they have depth and grain. They respond to volumes, edges, reliefs, openings. They can flow, breathe, accumulate, dissolve. They evolve, more or less abstract depending on the sequence, and that setting can shift within a single sequence.
I make them with a set of tools and a chain of treatments I build myself, and refine project after project. That path of making is what I call “Hylémorph”.
This toolchain also includes an in-house video player that simulates the projection in 360° on the actual volume.
This is the heart of the work, and it is decided with you.
Down to the millimetre. Every window, every cornice, every pilaster is respected. The architecture stays sovereign, the light underlines it and tells its story.
It crosses the façade, ignores it, overflows it. The building becomes a surface it covers and transforms.
Between the two lies a whole range. A heritage project and a brand project do not call for the same setting. A single work can travel from one end to the other over its duration, and that is often where it gets interesting.
Two rhythms cross constantly in these materials.
The speed at which the material transforms, the slow pulses, the breathing, the accelerations.
The scale of the details, and the way several scales overlap within the same material. One reading from the far side of the square, another at the foot of the wall.
Tuning these two rhythms against one another is what makes a material hold over time without ever wearing thin.
Façades, monuments, interiors, volumes, stage designs, immersive sets. Any surface that has a form and deserves to be taken seriously.
Each material is made for one place and one purpose.
You have a building, a space, an event. Write to me, and we will look together at what light can do with it.
contact@gioarts.com