Air Styling

YEAR: 

            2026 

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TYPE: 

            competition entry

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Air Styling imagines an invisible sphere of an atmospheric play, where wind and people gather to perform together around a series of oversized “air combs”. Borrowing from hair combs as cultural signs of heritage, care, and wellbeing, these enlarged forms of combs become seating objects arranged within an unseen force field of air.

Air styles that are imagined are like hairstyles in the real. The large “air combs” are created from combing digital air—experimental simulations using computational force field to produce imaginary craft. Appearing as weaving, knitting, knotting, stitching, and braiding patterns, techniques of craft are hybrids of virtual material attributes and physics principles. As simulated digital air is being combed into patterned styles, in the physical atmosphere, air is also the comb itself. Wind actively shapes the installation, styling the suspended yellow curtains. These lightweight elements, while serving as backdrops of the open-air stage, also respond continuously to atmospheric conditions, transforming air into the primary performer that combs hair and skins of the earth. 

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