Histolysis
Technology
Esp32
Carbon Fiber Rods
Custom PCBs
Fabrication
Custom Microcontrollers
LEDs
Dyneema Wires
DC Motors
Showcase
NEW INC - Creative Science
Demo Festival 2025
Date
2025
Do you remember what it felt like before turning human?
Histolysis is a kinetic installation in recursive, slow-motion transformation. A delicate, root-like structure pulsing in peristaltic rhythms. Evoking digestion, decay, renewal.
Suspended just above the floor, it is slow, subtle, and easily overlooked. Transformation unfolds not as spectacle, but as an infrastructural condition, gradual, distributed, and ongoing. The system resists resolution, remaining in a state of continuous reconfiguration that echoes the unstable, provisional nature of metamorphosis itself.
Image showing detail of 3D printed joint.
The name Histolysis comes from the biological process by which tissues break down during metamorphosis. In this piece, histolysis is condition of dissolution that makes transformation possible, not as a loss but as potential. A moment of in-between where transformation is taking place, and the outcome is unknown.
Movements are not mechanical, but somatic, tense, supple, and deeply regulated.
During metamorphosis, bodies dissolve and reassemble. Some studies suggest that insects can retain memories from their larval stages. Others show the opposite, where the brain liquefies completely and severs any link to what came before. Histolysis lingers in this ambiguity.
What does it mean for a body to transform so completely that it forgets itself? Can a larva sense the winged form it will become? Does it recognize the adult as kin? The work asks whether belonging can stretch across stages of radical change, and whether identity can survive not through continuity but through adaptation.
The sculpture is composed of twenty modular nodes, each a self-contained unit of motion and sensing. These modules connect magnetically, allowing the structure to be easily assembled, reconfigured, or expanded. This modularity makes the sculpture inherently adaptive, capable of being reorganized. The structure behaves less like a machine and more like a distributed body, where local actions ripple across the network in slow, coordinated waves.
