Current
↓
These are project proposals and bits of research I am working
on at the moment.
If any of this resonates with you,
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↑ First drafts for a multimedia installation with curved gaming monitors, laser-engraved metal structure, 3D-printed parts and two live simulations run on custom-built computers
Approximations
On 13 May 2008, I took a digital photograph of the old analogue TV in my grandma’s living room.
This was one of the last nights you could receive that type of satellite signal, before Germany switched from analogue to fully digital transmission.
As a child, I could hear when someone was watching TV, even on mute, and even in large apartment blocks—a high frequency sound at 15.625 kHz transmitted by CRT monitors. Around the same time I took that photograph, this frequency began vanishing from the urban landscape as blocky screens made way for slimmer digital equivalents. Now, this sound exists nowhere except obscure audioenthusiast YouTube channels.
I later learned that the characteristic static black and white noise that occurs when between channels, alongside the constant background humming of my childhood—had been discovered in 1964 to contain CMB, remnants of radiation from the Big Bang.
While perhaps not entirely scientifically accurate, I like to think of both the sound and visual noise as subliminal links to the beginning of time. Through our analogue TVs, we unknowingly lived in material entanglement with cosmic radiation—an enmeshment with the universe’s origin.
But what if this poetic link to deep time is merely a comforting fiction? What if these technologies have always been sites of violence—their materials extracted through colonial exploitation, their signals another layer of toxic exposure shaping our already traumatized bodies?
I dedicate this project to exploring this tension through an audiovisual installation that examines our entangled relationships with technology, questioning whether these material enmeshments represent cosmic connection or accumulated trauma.
The installation features three elements: two autonomous visual simulations facing each other—one recreating analogue TV static using radio signals and sensors, another generating an artificial biome influenced by the first’s parameters—and a simulated soundscape that interacts with both. These create a self-referential “sym-poetic” loop, where beauty and violence coexist in their closed system.
Building on my work with visual simulations, I want to develop and incorporate sculptural elements that allow the viewer to understand themselves as part of and question themselves as the activating element in this trialogue.
This installation interrogates the self-referential character of digital technology while asking whether our technological nostalgia obscures ongoing violence.
The work proposes that technology creates sympoetic states that are simultaneously beautiful and traumatic— moments where colonial and environmental violence have already shaped us, where our bodies exist as sites of accumulated exposure. The cosmic static we once absorbed may have connected us to deep time, but it also participated in systems of extraction and harm.
The installation provides space to hold these contradictions: to experience both the poetry of cosmic connection and the reality that we are already formed through toxic violence, encouraging viewers to question which stories we tell ourselves about our technological entanglements and why.
↑ Digital photograph of ‘turning off the digital TV signal’ on an old CRT television in Germany, 12 May 2009.
↑ First Drafts for a multimedia installation with curved gaming monitors, laser-engraved
metal structure, 3D-printed parts and two live simulations run on two custom computers
↑ Imaginary ‘screenplay’, a short conversation between a copy and its original,
intended for voiceover and caption track of a video work on the theme of nature & technology
A Conversation
between a copy and
the original
↑ Found Footage of Lahaina Noon, three drinking containers on concrete floor, pixelated image
(Source: Facebook)
Convergence.
The act of moving toward union
Lāhainā Noon, also known as a zero shadow day, is a semi-annual tropical solar phenomenon when the Sun culminates at the zenith at solar noon, passing directly overhead.[1] As a result, the sun’s rays will fall exactly vertical relative to an object on the ground and cast no observable shadow.[2] When this occurs at a given location, the location is Earth’s subsolar point. A zero shadow day occurs twice a year for locations in the tropics (between the Tropic of Cancer at approximate latitude 23.4° N and the Tropic of Capricorn at approximately 23.4° S) when the Sun’s declination becomes equal to the latitude of the location, so that the date varies by location.[3] The term “Lāhainā Noon” was initiated by the Bishop Museum in Hawaii.[4]
The subsolar point travels through the tropics. Hawaii is the only US state in the tropics and thus the only one to experience Lāhainā Noon.[5] In 2022 and 2023, the phenomenon occurred in Honolulu on May 26 and July 16.[4] Hawaii and other locations between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn receive the sun’s direct rays as the apparent path of the sun passes overhead before and after the summer solstice.
Lāhainā Noon can occur anywhere from 12:16 to 12:43 pm Hawaii–Aleutian Standard Time. At that moment objects that stand straight up (flagpoles, bollards, telephone poles, etc.) cast no outward shadow. The most southerly points in Hawaii experience Lāhainā Noon on earlier and later dates than the northern parts. For example, in 2001 Hilo on the Island of Hawaii encountered the overhead sun around May 18 and July 24, Kahului, Maui, on May 24 and July 18, Honolulu, Oahu, on May 26 and July 15 and Lihue, Kauai, on May 31 and July 11. Between each pair of dates, the sun is slightly to the north at solar noon.[6]
Chosen in a contest sponsored by the Bishop Museum in the 1990s, Lāhainā Noon was the selected appellation because lā hainā (the old name for Lāhainā, Hawaii) means “cruel sun” in the Hawaiian language.[7] The ancient Hawaiian name for the event was kau ka lā i ka lolo which translates as “the sun rests on the brains.”[5][8]
The event is often covered by Hawaiian media.[5][9][10][11] Activities are associated with the event.[12]
Sky Gate, a unique sculpture in Honolulu created by artist and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi, features a bendy, bumpy ring that has large changes in height around its circumference. Most of the year, it makes a curvy, twisted shadow on the ground, but during Lāhainā Noon, the height-changing ring casts a perfect circular shadow on the ground.[13] There are often activities held by the City & County of Honolulu around the time of the event on the Frank Fasi Civic Grounds, where the sculpture is located.
The phenomenon occurs in stories, including “Lāhainā Noon” by Eric Paul Shaffer (Leaping Dog, 2005),[14] which won the Ka Palapala Po’okela book award for Excellence in “Aloha from beyond Hawaii”.[15][16]
Text: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahaina_Noon)
Shadow mapping or shadowing projection is a process by which shadows are added to 3D computer graphics. This concept was introduced by Lance Williams in 1978, in a paper entitled “Casting curved shadows on curved surfaces.”[1] Since then, it has been used both in pre-rendered and realtime scenes in many console and PC games.
Shadows are created by testing whether a pixel is visible from the light source, by comparing the pixel to a z-buffer[2] or depth image of the light source’s view, stored in the form of a texture.
↑ Found Footage of Lahaina Noon, urban structures
(Source: Reddit)
↑ A level photographed during Lāhainā Noon, Honolulu, 16 May 2023. 21° 18′ 18.86″ N, 157° 51′ 19.01″ W
(Image Courtesy Eli Fessler, Source: Wikipedia)
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Please contact me for more information, availability and pricing.