Sculpt Grow – Ringkern

“Sculpt Grow – Ringkern” is the first work in the Sculpt Grow series. The set-up shared by all the others is described here.

Sculpt Grow lets a garden grow on the building blocks of a sculpture – like a forest in time-lapse. On every sphere and every cube, plants made of coloured spheres sprout: tendrils and cushions of moss creep across the faces and over the edges; stalks, knotted stalks, umbels, panicles, corals, polyps and bud stalks rise up. Similar species grow close together, and so fields form. Each plant begins with a small tip, grows thicker behind it, holds for a while and finally withdraws to its root – elsewhere a new one sprouts. Beneath them bubbles an underlayer of moss made of spheres that swell and shrink; pulses run through the tentacles like a heartbeat, and some branches breathe.

The vegetation clings to the building blocks and sways elastically with them when they move. If a shoot bumps into a neighbour, it climbs over or withdraws and grows anew; the long tentacles grow towards wherever there is room. Close to the root the plants carry the colour of their building block, and towards the tips they pass softly into the palette; buds on their stalks glow in colours of their own and pulse. Pollen rises from the tips and gathers into clouds, clumps and dense white knots. Fractal clouds of light drift across building blocks and vegetation.

With Grow X you grab the parts on your phone – in the browser, without an app: ring, sphere, trackball, 3D mouse, joystick, gamepad, arcade, VR, camera, touch and writing – and shake the garden. For each work, six films show it in a walkthrough, up close, in changing colour worlds, with two controllers in the hand and for two.

Sculpt Grow belongs to the Sculpt family, alongside Sculpt, Sculpt Color, Sculpt Dark, Sculpt Dark Color, Sculpt Void, Sculpt Void Color, Sculpt Void Full Color, Sculpt Trace and Sculpt Fade.

About the sculpture: Render4Sculpt, 126 cubes – two rings of 36 cubes each around a double core of 3 × 3 × 3 cubes. As a 3D print in the Sculpture Garden: “Ringkern”, 25 cm, work number 2026.00.291. Also as Sculpt, Sculpt Color, Sculpt Dark, Sculpt Dark Color, Sculpt Void, Sculpt Void Color, Sculpt Void Full Color, Sculpt Trace and Sculpt Fade – Ringkern.