Metamorphic Zone

Metamorphic Zone is an editorial inquiry and research network weaving together emerging practitioners across art, architecture, science, technology and media. Our platform facilitates encounters that reimagine how aesthetic and creative modes shape collective ways of thinking and acting. The inquiry is organised through two parallel sections: Matters of Concern: Shared subjects tracing overlapping interests across diverse disciplines. Field Notes: Situated reflections emerging through the practices of our contributors We view the editorial process not as the curation of finished works, but as a method of co-production: an ongoing articulation of relations from which new questions, vocabularies, and alliances emerge. 
Explore the project via the link in bio. 
Editorial Team: Kan Li @k.a.n.li Haoge Gan @nogoodcaption 
Visual Identity & Web Design: Studio Pianpian He and Max Harvey @infoandupdates Web Development: Mianwei Wang @aukewor 
 With thanks to the contributors for their essential role in shaping this collective inquiry. Note: For the best experience please visit us on desktop while the mobile version is still optimising！ 🛠️

Metamorphic Zone begins from co-production: a living field of correspondences where practitioners, ideas, and words continuously encounter and reshape one another. Words here not as vessels of fixed meaning, but as mediators of relation, thresholds through which practices meet, translate, and transform.

To engage is to enter the conversation. We’re opening the network to early-career researchers, artists, designers, architects, scientists, writers, and practitioners working across disciplines. If your work aligns with these inquiries, feel free to message us or visit metamorphiczone.com for more information.

• Alessio Pinton in Conversation with Metamorphic Zone Scientific classification exists to stabilise what matter refuses to be. Alessio Pinton takes this impasse not as a failure but as a generative method. The conversation, centred on Alessio’s publication An Amalgam Paradigm, moves across multiple registers at once: the formation of the Dolomites through the sedimentation of ancient marine organisms, the necessity and limitations of scientific classification, and a publication designed as a form of sedimentation. Each operates by the same logic. Categories are vessels, not verdicts, and the continuity they interrupt keeps reforming. The framework Alessio develops does not dissolve classification. It integrates it, showing how the approximations that language requires are less a shortcoming than an opening where biological and geological forces, long held apart by the hierarchies built into naming itself, can be read as states of the same ongoing process. An Amalgam Paradigm names this condition and performs it simultaneously. Alessio Pinton @pin_tuna is a new media artist and design researcher based in Rotterdam whose practice builds on the design of procedural systems and mediation machines aimed towards an empathetic perception of the non-living. By reworking natural phenomena and scientific theories that challenge the dichotomy between the organic and the inorganic, Alessio aims to contribute to a culture of the expanded self and self-recognition with the other. Avid explorer of digital technologies and an enthusiast of natural sciences, Alessio works at the intersection of the virtual and physical worlds. His practice ranges from 3D modelling to coding and music production, including research into materials, with the aim of pushing the boundaries of digital storytelling and fabrication towards unknown territories. For the full interview, please visit our website.

· Benedetta Ferrari in Conversation with Metamorphic Zone Spanning cosmology, media, and perception, this interview explores how mountains oscillate between the grounded “somewhere” of lived experience and the abstract “nowhere” of detached observation. Through relational thought, Enlightenment abstraction, and the lived geographies of the Alps, Benedetta Ferrari examines how mountains become cosmotechnical devices shaped by culture, media, and environment. The conversation traces their shifting roles – as laboratory, symbol, infrastructure, and agent – revealing how different visual regimes and material conditions produce divergent imaginaries of the cosmos. Moving across media and experience, it shows how mountains both anchor and unsettle our attempts to grasp the world. Benedetta Ferrari @aaudreyhorne is an Italian visual designer and researcher. Through editorial practices, moving images, and image-based installations, she explores the relationship between forms of knowledge production, territories, and sensing infrastructures.During her MA in Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, she deepened her interest in environmental thinking and visual culture, researching how landscapes – especially alpine and high-altitude territories – are represented, exploited, measured, and imagined. For the full interview, please visit our website. #alps #mountainimaginary #situatedknowledge #visualepistemology

• Field Note: Rare Earth. by Shuhang Cao Shuhang Cao reads rare earth as a transformative device that renders entangled forces legible. Bypassing established narratives of ecological critique or techno-optimism, she positions rare earth as an active medium that records, reconfigures, and amplifies the connections between material and meaning. Tracing the transformation of Zomia – a mountainous region historically defined by its evasion of state power, which is today profoundly warped by new planetary paradigms: the technosphere – Shuhang shows how the rapid expansion and intensification of the technosphere does not simply extract from territory but configures its spatial and material conditions from within. Rare earth oscillates between geological deep time and the contemporary world-system. It becomes a site where contradictory desires collide: the promise of clean energy, the friction of geopolitical contestation, and the aspiration toward autonomy and evasion. In this sense, rare earth emerges less as a substance than as a structure through which new planetary imaginaries are both sustained and haunted. Shuhang (Clarice) Cao @shuhang_cc is an interdisciplinary researcher currently at LSE Geography and Environment and will be pursuing her PhD at UCL IRDR. Following her prior studies at the Architectural Association, her work focuses on the assembly of high-energy geophysical hazards and disaster reduction in the Anthropocene, particularly in high-mountain Asia. Meanwhile, she is also an avid climber and mountaineer. #rareearth #zomia #energytransition #technology

• Matters of Concern: Navigating by Sheer Gritzerstein Sheer Gritzerstein reframes navigation as a critical method for calibrating sensibility. Instead of seeking a static state of ease, she locates agency in the effort of uncertainty, a condition that compels the subject to become attuned and responsive. Navigation thus unfolds as a recursive and dynamic practice: it is the proactive, continuous forming and re-forming of relationships with an unpredictable environment, finding agency not in insulation but in active engagement with instability. Sheer Gritzerstein @sheergritz is an architectural desigher, researcher and educator. Prior to completing her BArch and MArch from the Architectural Association, she worked as a geographical intelligence researcher and educational sailing coordinator. Her work focuses on navigation practices as well as on the architecture and politics of comfort in the Anthropocene.

• Matteo Bettini in conversation with Metamorphic Zone Matteo Bettini examines resolution as both a technical specification and an epistemic condition. Moving between information design and collective image-making, he extends this practice through 4KHD, as an inquiry into the “impossible” standard of contemporary media: the drive for extreme clarity paradoxically seeks to erase the technological medium to bring us closer to the real. Here, resolution begins to read less as a promise of fidelity than as a relational attribute that shifts between sensing and telling, where ambiguity, performance, and legibility continually renegotiate what becomes accessible. Matteo Bettini @600mt is an information designer and visual artist currently based in Rotterdam (NL). His work focuses on the visualisation of information, its spatial dimensions, and diagrammatic translations. He explores data visualisation and information design at large as a form of image-making: a tool to render things ambiguous, simplified, or, at times, deliberately complex. For the full interview, please visit our website. #resolution #media #technology #body #sensation

• Matters of Concern: View From Nowhere by Haoge Gan @nogoodcaption Developed as a reflection from Mountains as Cosmic Technologies, “View From Nowhere” revisits the fantasy of a neutral vantage point in science and imaging. Rather than a place without position, it traces how objectivity is staged through various actors that stabilise certain views so they can circulate as “fact”. The term points to the infrastructures that make detachment possible, and to the uneven distribution of who gets to appear as “universal” while others are marked as “local”, “subjective”, or “biased”.

• Matters of Concern: Cosmic Imagining by Benedetta Ferrari @aaudreyhorne In Mountains as Cosmic Technologies, Benedetta Ferrari introduces ‘cosmic imaging’ as a term spanning two registers – procedural precision and cosmological imagination – where material constraints shape both the rendering of astrophysical phenomena and the articulation of cosmological order.

• Field Note: Mountains as Cosmic Technologies by Benedetta Ferrari @aaudreyhorne [1] Michelangelo Caetani, Topographic Maps of the Divine Comedy, The Ordering of Paradise, 1855. [2] Robert Vivian, Scientist Joseph Vallot on Various Expeditions to Mont Blanc, Accompanied by Other Scientists, Guides, and Porters, L’épopée Vallot au Mont-Blanc, 1998. [3] Benedetta Ferrari, Photographic Documentation of the Scientific Facilities at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS), Italy, 2025. [4] Benedetta Ferrari, Photographic Documentation of the Scientific Facilities at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS), Italy, 2025.

• Field Note: Mountains as Cosmic Technologies by Benedetta Ferrari In Mountains as Cosmic Technologies, Benedetta Ferrari reads the mountain as both a material formation and epistemic instrument, tracing how different cultures have mobilised altitude, mass, and remoteness as conditions for encountering what exceeds the terrestrial. Moving between cosmogonic narratives, sacred geographies, and modern scientific apparatuses, she demonstrates that distance is produced materially through altitude, rock density, and a controlled absence of noise before it becomes a philosophical claim to objectivity. Ferrari argues that technology is a cosmological practice shaped by place-specific worldviews. Mountains, she suggests, remain among the most enduring devices for sensing distant inferences, which become legible only through practice. In this sense, the mountain is a condition of access rather than a backdrop for inquiry, shaping what can be detected and how detection is made possible. Benedetta Ferrari @aaudreyhorne is an Italian visual designer and researcher. Through editorial practices, moving images, and image-based installations, she explores the relationship between forms of knowledge production, territories, and sensing infrastructures. During her MA in Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, she deepened her interest in environmental thinking and visual culture, researching how landscapes – especially alpine and high-altitude territories – are represented, exploited, measured, and imagined. #mountains #landscape #cosmology #technology #cosmotechnics