Siyun Sun

Satellite-informed simulations shape terrains that evolve in deep time, with rivers connecting rhizomatically and landscapes unfolding like memory. Technology acts as a sensorial medium, translating data and memory into environments that merge geological and psychological temporality, offering reflective, recursive encounters with matter and transformation.

What happens when emotion meets geology? When tears meet soil, erosion becomes empathy, a merging rather than a fracture. I explore the dialogue between geological and psychological time, where transformation becomes an act of reflection.

The terrains are affective, self-evolving environments. Here, technology operates as a sensorial medium that lets us feel the becoming of matter. Data, memory, and nature intertwine, revealing how the digital can mirror the Earth’s own slow pulse of change.

The folded terrains translate planetary data into meditative, grayscale abstractions inspired by Chinese landscape painting. Code becomes brushstroke, erosion becomes gesture. Each topography mirrors interior life: grief, endurance, and reflection materialized as shifting form. These digital landscapes dissolve boundaries between natural and synthetic, inner and outer, self and world.

I explore geological time, memory, and posthuman perception through procedural worldbuilding. Using Gaea and Houdini, I constructed terrains from satellite-derived elevation data, simulating erosion to form landscapes that evolve in real time. The accompanying film reveals this generative process, turning geological formation into visual narrative. This project bridges simulation, scientific modelling, and affective speculation, exploring how environments perform time, eroding, recomposing, and remembering themselves, to evoke a sensory experience of deep time that extends beyond human perception.