Merging Visions
︎ Click for the animated essay.
︎ Click for the Cave Documentation.
︎ Click here to read the LINA page.
Merging Visions is a research-driven artistic project that investigates the digital reconstruction of built and unbuilt environments, examining how nature, terrain, and urban landscapes are represented and interpreted through emerging technologies. It asks how these visual regimes shape not only our understanding of space, but also our ethical and affective relationship with environments and more-than-human agents. Through speculative design and animated essays, the project expands the vocabulary of architectural visualizations by highlighting intangible ecological, cultural, and historical layers.
Set in Salzburg, the project focuses on the Salzburg Festival’s theater infrastructure and its longstanding entanglement with the mountain into which it is embedded. Over more than a century, the theater has expanded through carving and extraction, gradually growing like a living organism within the rock. This infrastructure became an inhabited interface between city and mountain, staging architecture as a process rather than a fixed object. By tracing these transformations, Merging Visions frames urban space as a temporal, material, and ecological continuum shaped by both human and non-human forces.
Merging Visions constructs a fluid, affective, and open-ended world that reveals ecological and cultural rhythms embedded within the urban landscape. It further redefines the digital twin as a situated and historically embedded practice. Through contextual animated simulations, it shows temporal layers, artistic rituals, excavation processes and architectural growth. This reveals an evolving entanglement between media, space, technology, and nature. Merging Visions is also conceived as a large-scale projection that invites the audience to step into the dynamic urban data, offering embodied encounters with otherwise inaccessible scales, such as the internal space of the excavated mountain.
Guided by Haraway’s call to “staying with the trouble,” the project resists simplification. It embraces complexity and ambiguity, positioning built environments as an evolving medium shaped by ecological flows, cultural cycles, and material agency. By reclaiming the agency of digital production from regimes of optimization and standardization, the project establishes its own media ecology. Thus, urban environments and architectural developments are understood not as static entities, but as living interfaces in which human and more-than-human actors remain in a continuous process of becoming.
This work has been developed within the framework of ongoing S+T+Arts Ec(h)o residency.
