Projects & Art

Visitors aim coloured laser pointers at a 3D-printed alpine terrain. Where a beam lands, simulated water appears in the colour of the laser: it runs downhill, mixes with what it meets on the way, and settles as sediment in a projected sea at the foot of the installation. Nothing disappears; older inputs are only covered by newer ones and stay readable as layers.

The subject behind it is persistent chemicals such as PFAS: released locally, carried by water, archived in sediment. Real sediment cores are read the same way, as a record of what was released and when. By the end of the exhibition the sea holds the overlaid traces of hundreds of visitors.

A cat painted twice: first digitally in layers, then in acrylic on canvas, traced brushstroke by brushstroke from a projection of the digital original. The finished painting therefore matches its digital twin almost exactly.

That correspondence is what the second step builds on. The digital layers can be projected back onto the canvas and animate the painted surface: light, shadow and movement land precisely on the brushstrokes they belong to. Chilled Coffee Cat is the first work in the series Pinsel und Pixel.

A soldering kit in the shape of a mushroom rocket: a bag of parts, a circuit board cut to the silhouette, and step-by-step instructions. You solder it together, get comfortable with the iron, and end up with a small lit object for your desk.

The board does the decorating itself. The spots on the cap and the exhaust flame at the base are bare substrate, without solder mask or copper, left thin enough for the LEDs behind them to shine through; under the cap the copper traces fan out like gills. Everything decorative on it is also circuit.

Can be found here: Binary Kitchen/Soldering Tutorial. A ready-made kit is available at blinkyparts.

A rocket-shaped relief of stacked wooden layers, mounted on a wall and lit by a projector instead of LEDs. The wood itself is unpainted; all colour comes from the projection.

The layers are cut from the same CAD model the projection is mapped to, so light and object line up exactly. TouchDesigner drives it live: one hue per layer, a gradient across the stack, a slow drift over time, all from low-frequency three-dimensional Perlin noise. Next to the rocket, a simulated exhaust plume is projected onto the adjacent wall.

Pictures by Leah Oswald.

An egg-shaped lamp on a pole, carried a metre above a festival crowd so a group can find each other where phones have no reception. It picks up the music through a microphone and reacts to it: a wave of light runs down the shell on every other bar, and on a drop a simulated torch flares up inside, fed by the bass.

The only control is the pole itself: knocking it on the ground twice switches the light mode. The egg is printed in vase mode from translucent PLA and acts as its own lampshade.

Published in Make Magazin 4/2023.