01 / Experience
A window onto an uncertain day.
What is for Sure presents changing light through a window-like structure. Subtle shifts of colour and brightness recall daylight, but the sequence alters the familiar passage between sunrise and sunset.
Created with Verena Bachl, the work combines footage of natural scenes with artificially generated representations. A rhythm that usually helps us orient ourselves in time becomes uncertain when recorded and generated images are intertwined.
Awards
This project received the NTAA 25 jury prize
- Year
- 2024
- My contribution
- Concept, design, hardware, software and sound
- Homepage contribution summary
- Concept, design & sound
- Artistic authorship
- Verena Bachl & Karsten Schuhl
- Context
- independent artistic research collaboration
The light installation in an exhibition setting. Photograph: Verena Bachl.
02 / My contribution
Connecting image, object and computation.
I contributed concept, design, hardware, software and sound within the collaboration with Verena Bachl. The installation brings its moving visual source into a physical object made from stainless steel, glass, acrylic paint, LEDs, aluminium, PLA and custom electronics.
My sound work adds to the data-oriented nature of the light work. It translates the installation’s visual input into an auditory counterpart, adding another way of encountering the material.
Object
Physical design, hardware and custom electronics.
Image system
Software connecting visual material to the installation.
Generative sound
Analysis and resynthesis of the visual input.
03 / Development
Testing light at the scale of the object.
The development photographs move between strips of light, tests across a larger surface and the assembled panels in the workshop. They show the visual effect being explored through physical components.
The completed work measures approximately 158 by 106 by 5 centimetres. Within that shallow structure, materials and light together determine how the changing image is encountered.
Light and electronics during a prototype test. Photograph: Verena Bachl.
Working on the illuminated surface. Photograph: Verena Bachl.
An assembled panel tested in the workshop. Photograph: Verena Bachl.
04 / Sound for the film
Resynthesising the visual input.
For the auditory component, I analysed the colour and structure of the installation’s input footage in Max/MSP. The analysis was passed into a resynthesis system, connecting changes in the visual data to a changing sound treatment.
Different FFT block lengths produced tracks that filter and emphasise one another’s auditory structures. The deliberately low-fidelity translation gives the captured and generated footage an unexpected sonic counterpart.
A visual study from the development material. Photograph: Verena Bachl.
A further light and image study. Photograph: Verena Bachl.
Screenshot of sound resynthesis in Max/MSP
Film & documentation
See the work in motion.
Project film: Verena Bachl. Sound: Karsten Schuhl. Watch on Vimeo ↗
05 / Context
A familiar signal becomes open to interpretation.
The artwork asks what happens when a seemingly reliable environmental signal can be reconstructed and manipulated. Natural and artificial imagery share the same physical frame, making their distinction something to consider rather than immediately resolve.
What is for Sure was presented at the New Technological Art Award Exposition in Ghent in 2025 and is loaned to the Italian Embassy in Berlin in 2026.
The project is expanded by the essay written with Verena Bachl for the book Synthetic Realities.
Further reading