THICC SEAMS
by iheartblob

when architecture has it in all the right places

We no longer live in a purely physical world; we live in a post-digital hybrid that is simultaneously simulacra and tangible. The digital is so interlaced into our everyday consciousness that we often take for granted its impacts on society, politics and culture. We’re oversaturated with digital content, and the physical architecture that surrounds it is stretched and deflated - it can no longer barricade the digital inside.

Thicc Seams looks at the world not as physical versus digital objects but as two juggernauts jostling in the same space; their seams, their edges and their layers are becoming exposed as the digital is beginning to seep out. It is these moments that give us the most understanding about the relationships between physical and digital objects. Here they share interactions and reflect upon a phenomenal transparency as well as a literal transparency; a digital transparency and therein a phygital transparency. This is a notion of visibility that opposes a separation of physical and digital and encourages the digital to tear at physical seams.

Seams within purely physical architecture are the residue of parts – a legacy of tectonics that the digital does not have. Here, the digital uses these seams expressed as the interplay between physical material connections, high contrast edges, corners, projections and a myriad of spatial and formal overlaps to forge a new type of relationship between parts to wholes, and manifest themselves in a much more nuanced way than the mere agglomeration of physical architectural parts.