Shaping Light: Residency with TU Braunschweig's Nitride Technology Center

After considerable time without any updates (that's life getting in the way), I'm really pleased to announce that I will be the next artist in residence at the Nitride Technology Center and the Laboratory for Emerging Nanometrology at Technical University Braunschweig, Germany!

I've just spent three intensive days with the university's Science and Art Lab and researchers at the university, exploring the laboratories and speaking about their research programmes in preparation for the residency next year, and I'm more than excited.

Micro LED research, microscopes, vacuum chambers and "beam-walks" for lasers.

The residency hinges on artistic and scientific collaboration in the field of nitride technologies and micro LEDs in optical sensing, optical neuromorphic computing, artificial intelligence, and display technology. Titled "Shaping Light", the project will be facilitated by TU's Science and Art Lab in collaboration with scientists at LENA and the NTC.

My proposal for the residency begins with the hypothesis that the mirage is the perfect screen. It considers how the materiality of a mirage – air, light and energy – is akin to the materiality of digital images as they emerge upon a screen's surface. While we can still see the physicality of screens today, what happens when the frame of the screen disappears? Or, as philosopher Vilem Flusser asks, what happens when screen technology is so advanced that it is impossible to distinguish digital images from reality? Just like distinguishing the mirage from the water.

Hypothetically, nitride technologies like micro LEDs can bring us closer to Flusser's future. Not only because they can produce translucent screens, but because they remove the material aspect of technology by sending electrical signals with light. Like the mirage, MicroLEDs make light the message and air the medium.

LENA is developing an AI powered micro LED microscope that can "see" past the diffraction patterns (pictured here). Thereby, looking at objects smaller than the wavelength of light. This images details the diffraction patterns that typically obscure a microscope's view.