Material Interactions

Heidi Jalkh, a long time collaborator, contacted me because she was working on a new project Material Interactions. It all started as an edit for a video wall to complement the exhibition that tool place in ArtLab with her collaborator Nadya Suvorova— then I realised we had access to a TouchDesigner system on a 3×10 metre screen with full Lidar interaction. That's when I told Heidi that after I finished the video editing I would like to build an interactive piece for the wall.

After some thought, the most interesting directions I could pursue were: Physarum walkers, Metal Foam, and a Molecule Simulation. We included simpler pieces too, but these are the ones I want to focus on here. And none of it would have landed the same way without the soundscape by Ailin Grad.

Physarum walkers explore how complex organic forms emerge from simple behavioural rules — growth driven by nutrient trails, constrained by physical forces, shaped by environmental feedback. No explicit geometry is programmed; instead, intricate structures unfold: coral-like branches, folded organs, mycelial networks. A computational study of morphogenesis as a substrate for understanding how form arises from process rather than design.

The most technically involved of the three. At its core is a question: what if the chemistry could be watched as it happens?

Actual 3D molecular geometries for alginate and calcium carbonate are pulled directly from PubChem's open scientific database — the same data researchers use. A custom Python pipeline parses these files atom by atom, reconstructing each molecule with its real bond lengths, angles, and electrostatic charges.

From there, everything runs on the GPU: a GLSL physics simulation where molecules drift, collide, and respond to each other through simplified but chemically grounded forces — Lennard-Jones interactions, Coulombic attraction, harmonic spring bonds. As acetic acid dissolves the calcium carbonate in real time, freed Ca²⁺ ions are drawn across the frame toward the alginate chains, bridging two carboxylate groups from different molecules in the same egg-box crosslink that gives the physical sculpture its form. What you are watching is not an animation — it is the material reasoning through itself.

A custom Python algorithm mathematically constructs a volumetric gyroid network — introducing organic jitter to simulate the intricate porous structure of real metallic foam. A bespoke GLSL shader then processes the resulting 3D point cloud in real time, applying depth-aware rendering and layered glows that respond to visitor touch and spatial proximity.