In a meditative six-minute deconstruction of their R&D-based design process, CD Clayton Welham and the team at Found Studio in London build an exhibition of digital art to “explore what sensation, feeling, and emotion might look like.”

Clayton Welham: “Through a series of connected works, INVISIBLE shines a light on Found’s research-based studio practice. Employing neuroscientific insights, we reveal there is more to materials, products and subjects than meets the eye.

“Our starting point is five base forms, each illustrating an aspect of our craft. Slightly complex and puzzle-like, they are blank canvases representing the client brief. These thought starters give us a platform to demonstrate the fundamentals of our studio practice. Through each chapter, we reveal the layers of thinking, building and craft that go into our work and how these fundamentals add up to create visual results that immerse our audience, engage the senses, and evoke emotion.

“First, we explore the fundamentals of form and fabrication through an evolution of shape and structure. This chapter celebrates our understanding of how things work and fit together and how they exist and behave in a three-dimensional space.
 

Through each chapter, we reveal the layers of thinking, building and craft that go into our work and how these fundamentals add up to create visual results that immerse our audience, engage the senses, and evoke emotion.

 
“Next, we take the viewer on an inward journey through a series of cellular renders. We learn more the closer we get, and via an AI up-res tool, the detail is reinvented every time we push in. This voyage of digital discovery reveals new detail, texture and color at every step.

“Another invisible aspect of our everyday practice is light. When this simplest of components is choreographed as part of an animated sequence, we can affect mood, legibility, tension and drama. We can even evoke behavioral and emotional responses.

“Combining the fundamental aspects of our practice allows us to turn our tools to visualizing the intangible world of emotion. This chapter swings between moods to evoke feelings as polarized as the intensity of anger to the serene quietness of calm.

“Finally, we all share a set of senses that help us navigate the world. Here we push our techniques further to bring invisible attributes of scent, taste and touch to life. Evolving aroma complexes, mouth feel, and flavor notes sit next to visual investigations into tactility of surface and form.”
 
 

 
Production: Found
CD: Clayton Welham
Designer: Andrea Marshall, Corentin Aznar, Jack Seymour, Kieran Gee-Finch, Nicole Peterson
Producer: Sophia Georgiou Massaro
Conceptual Artist: Sylvie Minois

Audio: Simon Keep

Thanks: Dennis Georgiou (First Network), Katherine Templar Lewis (Kinda Studios), Lorna Houlahan, Paul Brandi (Fine Grain Carpentry), Paul James Dalton, Rob Coke and Sylvie Minois.