Skiagraph

Skiagraph (from the Greek skia, shadow, and graphein, to write) is a light installation that writes with shadow. It returns to the magic lantern, one of the oldest machines for projecting images, and feeds it artwork that began on a screen. Generative drawings made in TouchDesigner are laser-cut and etched into acrylic, turning pixels into physical slides. Loaded into a Kodak Carousel S-AV 2000 slide projector, or wrapped around a lamp, the slides send the patterns back out as light: enlarged, softened by the lens, and cast across walls, bodies and the room. The work sits between the digital and the analogue. A process that lives in real time on a computer is fixed into a material object, and then released again by the oldest kind of projection, where light simply passes through a cut surface and the image appears in its shadow. Credits Thanks to Maximilian Lana and Marinus Paul for the laser-cutting and slide-making techniques.