Chromatic Ecologies
Chromatic Ecologies
Re-appropriating Handmade Tie-Dye through AI Worldbuilding
Chromatic Ecologies is a series of digital works that reimagine handmade Chinese tie-dye through AI worldbuilding and real-time rendering technologies. Developed for Silk Road Convergence: Encountering the Beauty of Modern Tie Dye — Handmade & AI, the project explores how traditional craft can be translated into immersive spatial environments.
Beginning from a selection of handmade tie-dye works, the project reconstructs their colours, textures, and organic diffusion patterns into cinematic three-dimensional worlds. Through a hybrid pipeline combining AI 3D generation, Blender, and Unreal Engine 5, the works evolve from textile surfaces into immersive ecosystems where pigment becomes atmosphere, colour becomes architecture, and traditional craft is reimagined as inhabitable digital space.
Rather than presenting the environments themselves, the final works are created by navigating through these virtual worlds and digitally photographing carefully composed moments within them. By framing still images from inside the environments, the project preserves a painterly quality while revealing new forms of digital materiality, where colour, texture, and spatial ambiguity coexist between the handmade and the computational.