Art+Science - Lenticular Installation

Sydney+Berlin

Merging art and science

For our free project semester in the Master’s of Leadership in the Creative Industries, our team decided to experiment with tangled scientific concepts and use them as an inspiration for a multi-location art installation, the result was the Art+Science Project.

My personal main contributions to it were the conceptualization and coding of the pieces of software that were used for the installation. The team was integrated by multi-talented people that all contributed to each aspect of the project.

Jack Mangelsdorf+Erdem Turan+Maren Heinrich+Christoph Stodt+Ronald Norori

From a scientific concept to an art installation

Visualizing the Quantum Superposition

We conceptualized an interactive installation that picks up the themes of Randomness and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The main piece of our installation is a lenticular structure, that allows two different images to be projected on its surface at the same time, allowing the public to decide which image to see depending on their perspective.

This approach levers on the thematic and physical bond between the exhibition’s theme “Quantum Physics”, the different and distant locations and the visitors of each exhibition.

Radioactive cats and processing prototyping

To finally land on the idea of a lenticular installation was a challenge by itself, multiple different options were considered before, including Sound, Kinetic and Light installations. Our main focus was to capitalize on the different locations and produce a visually appealing but scientifically accurate representation of the strict concepts we were using as an inspiration. Our scientific concepts were supported by additional materials that included summaries of white papers and mini apps.

Schrödinger's Cat

(Not) getting lost in translation

To help the public and our supervisors understand the scientific undertones of our project, we produced several supporting materials, some of which were interactive apps programmed in ActionScript and Processing 3. From a Schrödinger’s Cat game, that is playable here, to a true random number generator that helped us get the message of pseudo-random and true-random across.

Building the prototype

The prototype

For our final presentation, we created a full-size prototype that thoroughly showcased our concept, technological approach and artistic choices. The lenticular structure displayed two different camera feeds that were filtered and transmitted by software fully coded by ourselves, it made use of Processing 3 and Touch Designer, a visual programming language for real time interactive multimedia content.