MORPHOLOGY: Peter Nelson and Tobias Klein (in collaboration with Alvaro Cassinelli)

December 2025

Tobias Klein and Peter Nelson are intellectually adroit artists and professors who took up the subject of the ‘aesthetic rock’ (or ‘scholar’s rock’) for their creative work early. To admire a naturally formed rock as an artistic object is peculiar, even though it is instinctive for humans to be attracted by strange objects. The long tradition of the ‘scholar’s rock’ in China is well known, and it is usually associated with the painting tradition of shan-shui, ‘mountain-water’ landscape, where the rock is deemed integral to the morphology of the mountain. But today, in the age of excessive material production, when much of worldly goods are industrially made, the question of the ‘form’ and constitution of the aesthetic rock, the ‘thing’ that is a ‘non-product’ and yet considered ‘aesthetic,’ deserves further scrutiny.

Cloud Rock Series

The Cloud Rock series are based on found Scholar Rocks. Scholar Rocks are highly sought-after artifacts in Asian culture. In Japanese Culture, suiseki (水石) or in Chinese Gongshi (供石), both have in common that they are found rocks placed in a crafted base. The complementary human craft amplifies the natural beauty of the rocks. Their shapes are the result of millennia of natural erosion and slow transformation juxtaposing the fleeting notion of the man-made artifact. Together their geometrical and narrative complexities form a microcosm for human reflection and interpretation. Cloud Rock I is made from two natural rocks excavated in the Guangzhou region of Southern China.The rock is held in a base that forms around the 3D-scanned rock.The base is a stainless steel, 3D printed using Selective Laser Sintering(SLS). The rock floats above the base, held by a series of tendril-like extensions.

Kunst. Werk.Stein.Schlag (KWSS)

Kunst.Werk.Stein.Schlag (Art.Work.Stone.Hit) is a kinetic artwork combining found Chinese Scholar rocks with custom-made electromechanical devices. It transforms traditional Gongshi scholar’s stones—Taihu rocks shaped by water over millennia— from contemplative objects into activated bodies, producing industrial mining sounds that break cultural silence. Strapped with machining belts and held by 3D-printed armatures, the object traverse from inanimate geological formations to animate characters, exploring morphology as an ongoing dialogue between geological time, cultural memory, and technological intervention. The work invites recontextualization, exposing how interpretive frameworks decode materiality and temporality across cultures.

Lumens

Sternwerk

Sternwerk is an interactive installation creating meaning through the constellation of a meteorite (deep time), a simulation (Conway’s Game of Life), and human presence. The meteorit, acting as a heat sink for the computation, becomes a condenser for human breath. As each drop falls, amplified by sound, it resets the cellular automata simulation, perpetually restarting a fragile universe. This cyclical process transforms our ephemeral breath into a microcosmic echo of vast temporal scales. The residue carried by each drop becomes a material archive, a humble counter-monument to deep time and human encounters with the cosmic.