Palimpsest Worlds

Every event leaves its mark. The scuff of a rubber-soled shoe on a hardwood floor, the pits of a coal mine gouged out of the earth, the decaying carbon-14 isotopes of a nuclear detonation embedded in oil paints all across the world. The world around us exists as the consequence of events, and in the details of that world, we can find traces of the past. In Palimpsest Worlds, students created layered virtual scenographies that offer windows into alternate pasts or speculative futures. They followed a process of detailed, iterative, and whimsical worldbuilding, through which they simultaneously designed fictional environments and discovered the events which led to their existence. Along the way, students studied digital production design, lighting, color theory, PBR rendering, detailed digital texturing, terrain modeling, animation, and editing, and used Cinema4D and Octane Render to assemble spatial narratives.