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Design

Aperture Is A Poetic Installation Resembling 130 Eyeballs

German collective TheGreenEyl experiment with reactive surfaces.

German multidisciplinary group TheGreenEyl, who you might recognize from their revamp of MIT Media Lab’s visual identity, are most excited about the possibility of intelligent surfaces. Their work Aperture, which has been in development since 2005, has just been recently installed at Stéréolux, a French space dedicated to digital art.

As member Frédéric Eyl explains in the video above, they were inspired by human skin and more specifically by pores when developing their project. To set up the installation, the artists embedded sensors and engines in 130 iris-like openings that enable the installation to evolve according to the intensity of the light and to surrounding patrons’ movements.

As they describe on their website:

Aperture acts like an autonomous skin capable of precise external control. Visual information is transmitted from the inside of the building to the outside. The surface permeability is regulated when the aperture's opening diameters are changed.

Each single aperture and all the apertures as an entity see what happens on the inside of the facade and react accordingly. Like the human eye's iris and the iris diaphragm of the object, they react to light, widening and contracting according to the intensity of incoming light. If no human activity is to be distinguished on the inside, a memory mode recalls images captured throughout the day and displays them.