“ Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel. Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel.”

Commissioned by Graphic Thought Facility for Kvadrat, this short film brings abstract shapes – devised by design duo Doshi Levien – to life. Taking their inspiration from the early Bauhaus’s avant-garde parties and theatre costumes, Doshi Levien combined Kvadrat textiles with abstracted figurative shapes to highlight the unique qualities of wool in conjunction with form. The objects were created as static sculptures of scale, that hang in installation and were launched as part of the Stockholm Furniture Fair.

The installation and subsequent film are touring Kvadrat’s showrooms, and in our animated interpretation, the objects now become living characters, exploring their world within a pre-defined space. Director Philip Hunt chose to ease the objects into motion not by anthropomorphizing the shapes into human forms, but by focusing on the nature of each shape & form; combined with its colour & texture to create a living composition.

The way the shapes behave and move was also inspired in part by the wonderful ‘Evolved virtual Creatures’ experiments of computational artist Karl Sims – the resulting film is a 90-second abstracted choreography that documents the shapes as living creatures:

“… each given locomotion by the possibilities and restrictions inherent in its physical form – despite & because of their physical properties & limitations …”