Project Overview

“Soft Collapse” is a moving digital artwork created through a process of pixelated distortion and subtle, rhythmic fragmentation. It explores the intimate disintegration of identity, memory, and presence—rendered in shifting grayscale and composed of overlapping square frames. The work moves quietly, almost tenderly, unraveling itself in fragments that simultaneously dissolve and reconstruct. At its core, “Soft Collapse” is about the quiet undoing of form: not a violent destruction, but a slow, graceful fall into abstraction.

Context & Background

This piece emerged from reflection on the impermanence of perception—how the self can feel stable one moment, and fractured the next. In a world where presence is constantly mediated through digital screens, “Soft Collapse” offers a meditation on the tension between image and erosion, clarity and disappearance. Inspired by glitch aesthetics, dream logic, and somatic memory, the work presents a portrait that never fully reveals itself. What you see is always mid-transition, a moment caught between coherence and decay.

Process & Technique

Created using a mix of high-contrast photographic imagery, frame-by-frame distortion, and animated pixel segmentation, the piece was built to feel fluid despite its structural fragmentation. The image was manipulated using layered masking, low-bit interference, and grid-based disruption. Fine details—like the silver hoop earring or the texture of skin—remain momentarily visible before slipping out of alignment, as though memory is glitching. The use of square frame movement and offset layering was deliberate, evoking the look of corrupted video or interrupted signal, but softened to move like breath rather than noise.

Final Work

In the final animation, a figure emerges in grayscale: a face turned in shadow, partially illuminated, yet persistently elusive. Square-shaped segments shift gently across the image, unraveling the face into loops of flickering geometry. The glow of the earring and the gentle grain of skin remain as anchors in a sea of visual collapse. “Soft Collapse” invites the viewer to witness a quiet undoing—not as destruction, but as transformation. It lives in the moment where identity blurs and becomes impression, offering a sensory experience that is both digital and deeply human.