Ruoxi Li

Encoded Strata

This project explores the material side of digital objects through the breaking of 3D model files. Drawing on theories of media geology and digital materiality, it uses glitch as a way to examine how digital forms are constructed through layers of code, signals, and physical infrastructure. Centered on a discarded hard drive, the work moves between its physical components, its digital model, and the distorted versions that emerge when code is disrupted. Through 3D modeling, physical disassembly, magnetic imaging, and animation, the project revealing the hidden structures that sustain digital objects and showing that the digital world is not weightless, but deeply tied to material reality.

Encoded Strata

Grayscale topographic landscape zooms out, code flash, glitched hard drive model fragments and reconstructs, then revealing magnetic force microscopy data.