Material Animation

a kinetic light installation

Material Animation is a kinetic light installation made from lasercut electro-luminescent (EL) foils which senses location, number and velocity of human occupants and responds through a mulitude of wirelessly networked components to encourage further interaction with the environment.

The experiment is situated in three rooms of an idle emergency bunker below ETH Zürich’s Science City campus. Each room reflects a different theme and approach to physically animate the distinctive material properties at an architectural scale. Electroluminescent foils are extremely thin, flexible and lightweight screens which emit a homogeneous cold light across their surface without the need for additional infrastructure.
The project was realized within 3 1/2 weeks by the 2010/11 MAS class at the chair for CAAD, ETH Zürich, supervised and tutored by Manuel Kretzer and Ruairi Glynn and supported through Lumitec AG and Ulano Corp.
It merges advanced techniques in parametric design, digital fabrication, physical computing, electronics and material science with theories and computational approaches to machine intelligence and sets them into a real world context.