24 computer-generated collages animated through Macromedia Pro into one of the earliest digital morphing videos — conceived as a digital sketchbook, the I-Scapes served as the preliminary drawings for the Guggenheim Virtual Museum and other key works by Asymptote.
In the late 1990s, the newly minted digital realms opened up radical possibilities for image-making. The I-Scapes series — 24 computer-generated collages — emerged from this moment, combining early imaging software, photographs, and rudimentary 3D models into dense composite fields where meaning is both constructed and obscured. Icons, fragments, and visual symbols are layered into compositions where forms morph between recognizable objects — sneakers, buildings, advertisements — and abstract digital terrain.
The Morph as Digital Sketchbook
The 24 collages became the source material for one of the earliest computer-aided morphing videos, produced using Macromedia Pro. Each collage was keyed to the next, creating seamless transitions across the full set — transforming static drawings into a temporal medium. Drawing not as a fixed image but as a continuous process of becoming. The technique anticipated by decades the procedural and generative approaches that would later become commonplace in computational design.
Conceived as a digital sketchbook, the morph was a moving field of speculative architectures — a way of thinking through form, space, and image in a medium that had no precedent.
From Sketchbook to Architecture
The I-Scapes morph served as the preliminary drawings for the Guggenheim Virtual Museum (GVM) — the world’s first virtual museum of contemporary art, commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The spatial qualities, morphing geometries, and navigable digital landscapes explored in the video directly informed the spatialities of this groundbreaking museum venue. In this sense, the morph represents a rare case where an artwork generated the formal and conceptual DNA for a major architectural commission.
The morphing sensibility developed in these sequences also fed into the design processes behind other Asymptote works — the fluid, transforming spatial logics visible in the Flux pavilions, the M-Scapes sculptures, and the HydraPier all carry the DNA of this early digital sketchbook.
Exhibitions and Collections
The collages were first exhibited as large-format Iris prints at Frederieke Taylor Gallery in SoHo, New York (1999), alongside the morphing video and the miniDV multiples — the full constellation presented in the landmark show I-Scapes 1.0: Consumable Architectures for a Digital Culture. Subsequently shown at the Julie Saul Gallery in New York (2000) and The Brooklyn Museum (2001). The morphing video, enclosed as miniDV multiples in one-way mirrored glass cubes (edition of 10), is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMoMA, the CCA, and Het Nieuwe Instituut.
