RADIX (with Xenorama)
Wooden sculpture augmented by projections and sound
Together with Marcel Bückner, Moritz Richartz, Richard Oeckel, Tim Heinze at Xenorama
Radix is a wooden root sculpture augmented by projection and sound. The sculpture is brought to life as a fictive entity: part organism, part apparatus.
In an ongoing play of light and sound the object undergoes a transformation from it’s initial natural shape towards a technical formation while the two aspects strive for dominance. Organic veins are taken over by digital structures and finally replaced by geometric patterns until the cycle begins all over again.
The project questions the relation between nature and technology and explores the dichotomy between organic structures and digital aesthetics. The combination of traditional biological elements and latest digital projection technology opens a completely new field of augmented sculptural objects. It creates a surreal appearance that blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual.
The spatial shape of the root was captured through 3D scanning technology and transformed into a digital model. The shape of the root was also extended by 3D printed polygonal objects that are placed on the wooden surface. Using the virtual replication of the root, the original visual and auditive perception of the wooden object and its properties and qualities could be scrutinized and augmented in the digital world.
For the technical setup a unique workflow was developed to ensure a perfectly fitting calibration of the projection onto the sculpture. Thereby 2D and 3D animations could be created in real-time on the actual object and the intriguing three dimensional effects and illusions would be evaluated right away. The animations were developed in constant exchange with the production of the accompanying sound composition.
RADIX was developed at Xenorama as an internal research project about the potential of organic surfaces, materials and shapes augmented with a digital layer of projected light, aesthetics and behaviors.
