kristian v.k. falden unravels AI images into fragile textiles
at copenhagen's ukurant, generative imagery becomes a suspended translucent textile shaped by meticulously hand-pulled threads.
[ADVERTISEMENT]
butterflies gather in loose thread at Ukurant
Inside Ukurant, the Copenhagen group show of emerging designers, Kristian Vallum Kryger Falden’s suspended textile work hangs like images caught in the middle of disappearing. Threads fall from the woven surfaces in pale, tangled lengths, while butterflies appear across the fabric where print, light, and loosened structure meet.
Entitled Unraveled in 49.5 Hours, the work is a continuation of Unraveled in Time, a series of sculptural textiles on view during 3daysofdesign. They move between textile and sculpture, with the image held in place by the same material that is slowly being pulled apart.
Falden’s presentation at Ukurant gives the project its immediate setting, while the work itself opens onto a longer question around how digital images can be slowed down through handcraft. Generative AI enters the process early, along with the artist’s own butterfly photography and references to Renaissance image-making.
The final works, however, are shaped through woven fabric, engineered sublimation print, draping, and more than 244 hours of hand-unraveling.
AI imagery enters the loom
Unraveled in 49.5 Hours, shown at Ukurant, began after Danish textile print designer Kristian Vallum Kryger Falden visited an exhibition by fellow artist Jim Lyngvild, where generative AI collided with the fantastical world of Hieronymus Bosch. The encounter stayed with him for its uneasy visual tension, with digital tools producing images that seemed to lean toward Renaissance realism while slipping into surreal illusion.
That dichotomy became a way into Falden’s larger series Unraveled in Time, where he uses AI as a starting point for image-making before the fabric takes over.
Across the series, motifs are developed through a mix of structural mapping and generative systems, then aligned to the folds and tension points of draped woven fabric. Sublimation print fixes those images onto the textile, but only temporarily in a visual sense.
Once Falden begins to remove threads by hand, the printed surface changes character. The image becomes thinner, more porous, and increasingly dependent on the space around it.
a personal image becomes a material system
Butterflies became central to the work through a set of encounters that Kristian Vallum Kryger Falden later understood as connected. In 2022, he lost his father. The Christmas before, his father had received a poster of Danish butterflies, a gift he never had the chance to hang.
Two years later, Falden encountered Carlos Amorales’ Black Cloud, an installation in which thousands of black butterflies overtook the museum space. Together, those memories turned the butterfly into a figure of loss, transformation, and spatial occupation.
In Unraveled in Time, the butterfly motif carries that personal weight without becoming illustrative. Falden treats the insect as a fragile structure that can hold an image together while also disturbing it.
Butterflies seem to infiltrate the AI-generated world, interrupting its logic and pulling it toward something more unstable. Their bodies become points of concentration within the fabric, surrounded by areas where the textile begins to loosen and decay.
craft through subtraction
Kristian Vallum Kryger Falden’s process depends on removal. After the fabric is printed, he begins picking the textile apart thread by thread, a slow action that shifts the work from image to object.
This is where the digital speed of AI meets a pace set by the body. Each thread that is pulled away changes the density of the surface, leaving behind a field of transparency, loose fiber, and partial image.
That unraveling gives the works their sculptural presence. When the textiles are draped from above, light filters through the open threads and turns the printed motifs into something spatial.
The fabric no longer behaves as a flat carrier for an image. It becomes a hanging structure of tension and weakness, with the butterflies appearing through the material as much as on it.
fragility becomes the value
Because the textiles can be torn apart easily, their vulnerability becomes central to how they are read. Falden allows the works to exist close to damage, where the beauty of the object depends on its exposure to change. The threads suggest labor, but they also carry a sense of instability. A finished piece still feels as though it could continue to come apart.
This sensitivity also runs through Falden’s use of color. In a recent reflection on the project, the artist wrote about being colorblind and deciding to trust his own color vision for the work. That detail gives the series another layer of perception. Color appears through a deeply individual way of seeing, shaped by uncertainty and confidence at once.
from generated image to woven absence
Earlier works in Falden’s practice already move through this language of print, textile, and undoing. The Unraveled pieces test how AI-generated imagery and butterfly forms can be translated into fabric, then altered through the hand. With each work, the image becomes less fixed and more dependent on time and physical touch.
Falden brings those questions into a larger sculptural field. The work engages AI without letting the screen define its final form. Instead, digital imagery is printed, draped, and taken apart until it becomes something delicate and physical. What remains is a set of textiles suspended between presence and disappearance, where future tools pass through the hand and come out changed.
project info:
artist: Kristian Vallum Kryger Falden | @kristian_falden
location: Sundholmsvej 46, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark
dates: June 10th — 12th, 2026
photography: © Kasper Heden Andersen, © designboom
This article is part of designboom’s Crafting the Future chapter, exploring what it means to be a maker in today’s world and the future of craftsmanship. Discover more related stories here.
