Material Animation

Material Animation is a kinetic light installation, made from laser-cut electroluminescent (EL) foils, which senses location, number and velocity of human occupants and responds through a multitude 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 Zurich’s Science City Campus. Each room reflects a different theme and approach to physically animate the distinctive material properties at an architectural scale. EL 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 Zurich, 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.