The pavilion Crystallized Skins is conceived in the tradition of plaster cast collections of the 18th and 19th century. European museums in that period started to collect a wide array of reproductions of Classical, Baroque and Renaissance masterpieces for artists, students and historians to experience an actual physical object and understand the aesthetic knowledge of the specific epoch.

Many of these collections were broken up or disappeared in storage during the first half of the 20th century, when the value of the casts was questioned. But now, in our digital age, a generation exists that is surrounded by copies, appropriations and remixes without questioning the origin of an idea. So this collection of virtual objects is extending upon the historic trajectory of the physical libraries, spanning an artistic heritage of centuries.

To unify the appearance of the virtual sculptures, they are reduced to the pure three-dimensional object and its underlying mesh structure, frozen in a compelling posture and excluding any animation or texture. Very much like the classical plaster casts, this allows for focusing on the construction of sculptural form and curvature details, as well as the overall composition.

These virtual sculptures have been three-dimensional in the conceptual phase as well as in the making process, but have been flattened into the rectangular frame of the final film sequence. Opposing them with the resulting experimental film, new ways of experiencing and understanding are made possible. For the future, the collection holds the potential to be extended with other film-object-constellations or even to reappear in the physical world with the help of 3d-printing technology.

All objects of the Crystallized Skins pavilion are provided by the artists under a NonCommercial Creative Commons license for download. Resulting remixes and artworks should be published under #crystallizedskins.