Silver Performing Arts, Stage, Style and Scenery Design · 2026
Carbon Silicon Singularity Stage Design
by Lampo Leong, Yanxiu Zhao and Haozheng Wu
- A' Design Award 2026 Silver Winner in Performing Arts, Stage, Style and Scenery Design
- Awarded April 15, 2026
- CLIENT: Centre for Digital Arts, Department of Arts and Design, University of Macau
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 34,024
- Verification code E33BBAB699 · Verify this award
About Carbon Silicon Singularity Stage Design
The work explores the moment when organic life encounters emerging silicon based forms of existence, including AI and algorithmic systems. Using the Singularity as a conceptual metaphor, it examines how this convergence reshapes ideas of life, identity, and ontology. Rather than presenting silicon as a replacement for the organic, the work emphasizes hybridization, coexistence, and mutual influence. At its core, it stages an evolving dialogue between carbon and silicon, imagining a speculative future shaped by new possibilities of embodiment.
Lampo Leong's Carbon Silicon Singularity Stage Design exemplifies the contemporary evolution of theatrical scenography into fully immersive digital environments where performer and projected visual field achieve profound synthesis. This work emerges from the intersection of multiple creative traditions including the light-space investigations pioneered by mid-twentieth-century kinetic artists, the expanded cinema practices that dissolved boundaries between screen and environment, and contemporary digital projection mapping technologies that transform architectural surfaces into responsive pictorial grounds. The compositional strategy positions the human figure as both subject and scale reference within an encompassing chromatic field, creating a dynamic relationship between bodily presence and technological spectacle that invites contemplation of contemporary existence at the intersection of organic and digital realms. The designer demonstrates sophisticated understanding of color psychology, employing a gradient progression from warm magenta through coral and yellow to cooler peripheral tones that creates both spatial envelope and emotional temperature modulation. The gestural, expressionistic quality of the projected imagery, with its organic drips, sweeps, and splatter-like formations, introduces painterly sensibility into the technological medium, suggesting dialogue between handmade mark and digital reproduction. The mirrored or faceted upper elements multiply and fragment the visual field, creating kaleidoscopic complexity that rewards extended viewing while maintaining the centered figure as contemplative anchor. The work invites consideration of the performer's role within such immersive environments, whether the human presence grounds technological spectacle or becomes absorbed into its visual rhythms, and how audiences might experience theatrical space when conventional boundaries between stage and projected world dissolve entirely.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- The work explores coexistence, convergence, and hybridization of distinct life forms. When humans project perception and emotion onto algorithmic systems, these entities operate as reflection that refract and complicate our understanding of human essence. The motif of a "dialogue between carbon and silicon" constitutes a conceptual axis: two forces simultaneously resisting, permeating, and co-constituting one another. Their intersection illuminates a speculative and fantastic future.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- This immersive installation measures 3.2m x 3.2m x 3.7m and features a digital ink generative video displayed on an LED panel. Acrylic mirrors line the walls, ceiling, and floor, creating a reflective environment that also functions as a stage for modern dance performance.
- Tags
- Immersive Stage Design, Dance Performance, Immersive Installation, Interaction between Calligraphy and Body Movement
- Production Technology
- This work begins with hand painted ink artworks and calligraphy on rice-paper. These physical pieces are then digitized using a high-resolution scanner. Using multiple tools and software, the images are transformed into dynamic, generative video compositions. Ultimately, the resulting immersive fine art installation becomes the stage environment for a modern dance performance.
- Design Challenge
- Transforming classical and contemporary ink painting and calligraphy into postmodern, digitally generated video art presents significant creative and technical challenges. Additionally, the video work also functions simultaneously as an immersive installation and as stage design for modern dance performance, further expanding the complexity and innovation of the project.
- Project Duration
- The project started in September 2025 in Guangdong and finished in December 2025 in Beijing, and it was exhibited in The 10th Beijing International Art Biennale in 2025.
- Operation Flow
- An immersive, digitally generated video art installation that serves as the stage environment for a modern dance performance. As the dancer moves through the space, she interacts with evolving calligraphic strokes, generating imagery that signifies an ongoing dialogue between carbon based life and emerging silicon based forms of existence.
- Research
- This work explores the transitional moment in which humanity confronts the emergence of silicon based forms of existence such as artificial intelligence and computational systems alongside traditional carbon based life. Using the Singularity as a conceptual metaphor, the work examines how this shift re-configures established understandings of life, identity, and ontology. Rather than depicting silicon as a replacement for organic existence, the work emphasizes hybridization, coexistence, and mutual influence. As humans project perception and emotion onto machinic entities, these systems reflect and complicate our understanding of human essence. Central to the series is the evolving dialogue between carbon and silicon - two forces that resist, permeate, and co-constitute one another - pointing toward a speculative future defined by hybridity and expanded possibilities of embodiment and being.
- Inspiration
- This series adopts the Singularity as a conceptual metaphor to examine the transitional moment in which humanity stands between carbon based life and emerging silicon based modes of existence. This shift signals a fundamental redefinition of life, self awareness, and embodiment. As carbon and silicon converge within shared temporal and spatial conditions, the boundaries of life become increasingly porous, allowing new ontological configurations to emerge.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Lampo Leong, 2025
Image #2: Lampo Leong, 2025
Image #3: Lampo Leong, 2025
Image #4: Lampo Leong, 2025
Image #5: Lampo Leong, 2025 - Patents
- Copyrights belong to Lampo Leong, 2025.