Lab / Image study2024, six plates

Breaking
visuals

What is left of an object once you let its shape go?

The idea
Image study
2024

We broke the generation on purpose, to find what an object becomes once it forgets its own shape.

Every plate began as an ordinary product image: a sneaker, a horse’s head, a controller, lit like a catalogue. Then we pulled the model off course. We loosened its grip on the brief, fed it a contradiction and let it rewrite most of the picture, until the geometry began to melt and something stranger came through.

What remains is neither a product nor quite an accident: colour, gloss and gesture, held for a moment before they fall apart.

A horse's head in black, white and blue with a red muzzle, still clearly a horse
Horse. Recognition outlasts the melt.Plate 01
A boot-shaped mass in orange and blue, the outline of a shoe holding while its surface runs
Sneaker. The silhouette holds while everything inside it runs.Plate 02
A rounded white shell with blue rings and dark buttons sunk into it, the remains of a controller
Controller. The buttons are the last thing to go.Plate 03
A glossy blue and white mass with an orange drip and a dark opening, all that remains of a shoe
Sneaker. Only the speckle and the drip remember the sole.Plate 04
A poured white and blue form with an orange core running down into drips
Sneaker. The colour stays; the object leaves.Plate 05
A marbled swirl of orange, blue and white with no recognisable object left in it
Sneaker. Pure form, with no parent.Plate 06
Process
Two passes,
one frame

Commit to an object, then refuse to keep it.

The first pass is a plain brief, written the way a photographer would be briefed (a sneaker, a horse’s head, a controller, studio lighting, white sweep) and held tightly, so the model commits to a real thing rather than an impression of one.

The second pass sends that same frame back with the leash almost off and a single contradicting instruction: melt. Around sixty per cent of the image is rewritten, enough to lose the shape but not the memory of it. Each result is cut out and set on a flat ground with its own shadow, shown as calmly as the product it used to be.

Only two dials matter: how tightly the model is held to the brief, and how much of the picture it is allowed to rewrite. The interesting work happens in the gap between them, where control gives way to chance.

What we
found

Material, weight and light survive the melt. Geometry does not.

Some plates still whisper what they were: the horse in the set of its ears, the controller in two sunken buttons, a boot in a silhouette that holds while its surface runs. Others let go completely and become pure form, a pour of colour with no parent at all.

That was the point. By breaking the process instead of perfecting it, the images arrive somewhere no brief would ever have asked for. The object dissolves, and what stays is its character: the colour, the gloss, the attitude that made it recognisable in the first place.

It is a study, not a style. None of it has been used in client work, and it may never be.

Back to the Lab