Verticalised Grounds: Memory, Matter, and Myth

Spotlight on Issue #9 of WOW WORLD Magazine

In WOW WORLD Magazine Issue #9,
Verticalised Grounds, we descend into the quiet depths of memory and ascend through imagined landscapes of stone, signal, and silence. This issue gathers artists who transform architecture, ecology, and consciousness into living terrains. Their works do not simply depict; they
excavate—pulling meaning from the strata of time, revealing how AI can render not only what we see but what we sense beneath the surface.

The creators gathered here move through a shared vocabulary of material and metamorphosis. In their hands, the digital becomes mineral, the algorithm becomes soil, and architecture becomes the language of belonging. These artists treat AI not as spectacle, but as a medium for remembering—an instrument that listens to both data and dust.

This issue does not offer escape.
It offers
excavation.

It is not about the future built in chrome, but the
past buried in light.

“Imagination becomes structure. It bends into spirals of text and light, unfolds as hybrid bodies of stone and root, and reshapes silence into patterns of time.”
—
Haidy Khidr, Creative Editor

Across its pages, Verticalised Grounds presents seven Spotlight artists whose practices extend the emotional reach of architecture, ecology, and AI into mythic terrain. From London’s synthetic forests to Singapore’s carved cliffs, from the quiet geometries of Milan to the haunted corridors of memory, these creators are redefining what it means to build, remember, and feel in the age of machine imagination.

Diego Castro – Synthesized Nature | London, UK | @monomosite

✦ Diego Castro – Synthesized Nature

Diego Castro, known professionally as Monomo, merges architecture, ecology, and digital art into a new vision of living design. Based in London, the artist approaches technology not as simulation but as symbiosis; an extension of the natural world’s intelligence. His background in sustainable architecture shapes his belief that every form should breathe, adapt, and coexist. In Synthesized Nature, the artificial and organic are inseparable, forming a world where geometry photosynthesizes and data behaves like root systems.

In his project Luminara, light becomes structure. Golden branches spiral through a forest of simulated dusk, casting illumination as gentle as respiration. The piece feels devotional, merging architectural order with ecological intuition. Mycelara pushes deeper underground; networks of luminous filaments stretch through dark soil, revealing how unseen forces sustain all visible life. Each render hums with quiet intelligence, proof that digital form can echo natural empathy.

Daniel Escobar & Giovanna Pillaca – Tropical Nostalgia | New York, USA | @diffusion_architecture

Daniel Escobar & Giovanna Pillaca – Tropical Nostalgia

Daniel Escobar and Giovanna Pillaca bridge memory, architecture, and landscape in their series Tropical Nostalgia. Based between New York and Lima, their collaborative studio Diffusion Architecture builds spaces that remember. They treat structure as vessel and nature as archive, crafting environments where time moves slowly, and walls breathe with recollection. Their work feels cinematic yet sacred, translating absence into beauty and ruin into reflection.

In The Chamber of Eternal Script, cascading golden text glows across monumental stone walls, its reflections mirrored in still pools below. The scene radiates awe and introspection, transforming architecture into scripture and silence into ritual. Sanctuary of Stillness, by contrast, offers intimacy; a single bed, open books, soft light against tropical greenery. It’s a moment of rest rendered monumental, a meditation on the domestic as divine.

Carlos Banon – Verticalised Grounds | Singapore | @carlosbannon

Carlos Banon – Verticalised Grounds

Singapore-based architect and researcher Carlos Banon transforms construction into conversation. As co-founder of AIRLAB at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Banon’s design ethos fuses computational precision with geological humility. Verticalised Grounds; both a philosophy and his featured project; explores how architecture can rise from the land without conquering it. His forms feel excavated rather than built, their strength drawn from restraint.

In Strate Living, dwellings emerge from a carved cliff face, each ledge glowing softly at dusk. The rock itself becomes home, as if the mountain had agreed to shelter life. The Legacy Library continues this ethic of embedded design: books rest in crevices of stone, knowledge layered like sediment. Banon’s Where Stone Remembers deepens the metaphor; a vast chasm cut into rock that glows with amber light, turning absence into monument.

Iosif Gkinis – Neocosmic Architecture | Milan, Italy | @ioscapes

Iosif Gkinis – Neocosmic Architecture

For Milan-based designer Iosif Gkinis, architecture is cosmic narrative; geometry rendered as emotion. Neocosmic Architecture defines his signature style: sharp contrasts, luminous tension, and structures that speak in silence. After a decade designing across Dubai, Shanghai, and Milan, Gkinis has distilled an aesthetic of presence; buildings that confront their surroundings while amplifying them.

In Shards Rising, a prism of concrete and steel bursts from a mountain, glowing from within like captured lightning. The form feels alive, asserting tension as beauty. Harbor of Light shifts tone, placing a solitary dwelling beside the sea; its blue surfaces reflecting both sky and memory. The project reveals Gkinis’s devotion to contrast: mass and void, gravity and grace.

He uses AI as collaborator, accelerating imagination without erasing intention. For Gkinis, architecture’s purpose is not shelter but revelation. Neocosmic Architecture transforms friction into harmony, proving that conflict—between light and shadow, nature and form—is not a flaw but the beginning of meaning.

Frederico Serra – InterGalatica Worlds | London, UK | @inter.galatica

Frederico Serra – InterGalatica Worlds

London-based multimedia artist Frederico Serra transforms the cosmos into narrative. With roots in design and visual effects, his series InterGalatica Worlds expands storytelling into immersive speculation. Serra doesn’t escape reality; he reconstructs it—layering science, philosophy, and cinema into vast dreamscapes that question perception itself.

In Eclipsed Horizon, the line between sky and land dissolves. Light cuts through mist like thought through memory, and architecture becomes metaphor; a landscape of consciousness unfolding across time. Skyward Gardens imagines floating rings of vegetation above cities, an aerial utopia where steel and forest merge into one sustainable vision.

Serra’s worldbuilding is both visual and emotional. His use of AI feels orchestral, composing harmony between technology and wonder. InterGalatica Worlds transforms the act of seeing into meditation, showing that imagination is not a form of escape, but a return—to curiosity, to possibility, to awe.

Cristina Dinea Papp – Frequency of Being | Transylvania, Romania | @cristinadineapapp

Cristina Dinea Papp – Frequency of Being

Transylvania-born artist Cristina Dinea Papp bridges painting, graphic design, and AI in a practice that treats creation as vibration. Her series Frequency of Being captures the invisible—energy, intuition, resonance—through imagery that glows like sound made visible. Each piece is less picture than pulse, a reminder that beauty is a frequency to which we must attune.

In The Scribe of Resonance, a figure bends over inscriptions of light, every mark alive with vibration. Language turns to energy, devotion to radiance. The Path of Ascending Echoes transforms movement into ritual: stairways of light spiraling skyward, figures ascending through gradients of gold and silver.

Papp’s art balances tradition with transcendence. By merging tactile brushwork with generative precision, she redefines painting as meditation. Frequency of Being radiates calm and alignment, reminding us that art, at its highest frequency, is not seen—it is felt.

Dalton Girling – Into the Dark | York, UK | @horrornoirfx

Dalton Girling – Into the Dark

British artist and filmmaker Dalton Girling reframes horror as empathy. His series Into the Dark merges photography, film, and AI to explore trauma, memory, and transformation. Rather than shocks or gore, his work lingers in silence; haunting spaces where fear becomes reflection.

In Strings of Fear, a suspended figure hangs in stillness, threads slicing through air like veins of anxiety. The scene evokes fragility and surrender, a body caught between control and collapse. Fractured Self mirrors this tension, a portrait shattered into smoke and bone, its dissonance painfully human.

Girling’s use of AI amplifies imperfection—the slight distortions, the digital scars—transforming errors into emotion. His horror is intimate, not spectacle but confession. Into the Dark invites us to face what we avoid: the quiet spaces where fear reveals tenderness, and where even terror becom

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Verticalised Grounds: Memory, Matter, and Myth