MORPING - ATEM LAB

2026 · Concept Project

A product is generally made outside the body and then affixed to it. A bag hangs from the shoulder; a shoe is put upon the foot. Yet if the form of an object has grown out of the structure of the body, then it is not affixed but differentiated. MORPING is a concept project addressing the moment immediately preceding the existence of an ATEM LAB object — the state in which form has not yet separated from the body.

The work sits within a biomechanical lineage: the host-parasite relation of Parasyte, the bodily proliferation of The Substance, the fusion of organism and machine in H. R. Giger. What this lineage shares is a single premise — that transformation is not violence applied from without but a process advancing from within.

Within the frame, skin becomes surface and bone becomes structure. The grain of muscle passes into the texture of leather; the folding of a joint follows the logic of a fastening. At what point the body ends and the object begins is never adjudicated, and that indeterminacy is itself the condition of the work.

The formal language of ATEM LAB has always been cellular and agglomerate — closer to form that has grown than to form that has been manufactured. This work returns that language to the level of the body, stating the origin of the object from the origin of its form.

Spec work