A Grain Of
Textures, Complexities, and Data Materialization of Shenzhen City
Textures, Complexities, and Data Materialization of Shenzhen City
Sensing the City
We began by immersing ourselves in three distinct urban environments across Shenzhen — documenting material traces alongside their spatial, visual, and sonic contexts. Each site offered a different ecology: from the organic rhythms of Wutong Mountain to the industrial sediments of Qianhai's construction zones and the layered human activity of Dongmen's retail streets.
Navigating the interactive sound-material archive — hover interactions reveal field recordings mapped to specific urban locations and material samples.
Building a Material Archive
Over eight weeks, we systematically collected approximately 160 material samples from Dongmen, Qianhai, and Wutong Mountain — soil, aggregates, water, plaster, concrete, shells, plant matter. Each sample was catalogued with its GPS coordinates, date, and environmental context, forming a longitudinal material database of urban change.
Labeled soil sample bags collected from field sites across Shenzhen's three research zones.
Material Sampling Timeline and Variability — an extensive eight-week collection from Dongmen, Qianhai, and Wutong Mountain, culminating in approximately 160 sample bags.
Translating Matter Across Modalities
Each collected material underwent a multi-step transformation: field recording of its sonic environment, 3D photogrammetric scanning of the physical sample, extraction of spectrograms from its audio signature, and UV wrapping of the spectrogram texture onto the 3D mesh. The result is a digital object that carries both the physical form and the acoustic identity of its source.
Data Materialization with Sound Texture — the transformation pipeline from physical material and sound recording to scanned geometry, spectrogram, mesh, and sound-textured form.
Exploring the Material-Sound Archive
The research methodology becomes explorable through an interactive web interface. Viewers navigate between reconstructed 3D forms, spectrograms, and field recordings — each material specimen a node connecting physical matter, digital geometry, and sound.
The interactive material-sound archive — connecting physical specimens, reconstructed 3D forms, spectrograms, and field recordings into a navigable database.
Making Data Physical
The digital archive materializes into physical space through 3D-printed translucent resin forms — each one derived from the sound-textured meshes of a specific material sample. Suspended from the ceiling and lit from within, these objects become tactile encounters with data.
Visitors interact with 3D-printed resin forms — each one a physical manifestation of a specific material sample's sonic and geometric data.
A Grain Of at Shenzhen Design Week
The complete installation was exhibited at Shenzhen Design Week — combining the interactive digital archive, physical material specimens, 3D-printed sound-textured forms, and projected data visualizations into an immersive multisensory environment.
Installation views — immersive space combining physical specimens, 3D-printed forms, sonification, and data projection.
Full installation walkthrough at Shenzhen Design Week.