Virtual Realizations · 2014 / 2026

FORMLITH

An interactive thermal-imaging environment in which bodily presence becomes a shared field between physical and virtual space.

A single dark slab stands in a hallway — monolithic, wall-integrated or freestanding, showing nothing. It waits. When someone comes close, thermal and infrared sensing registers the arriving body and the surface wakes.

What returns is not a reflection. The visitor appears as a cloud of emitted heat: porous, unstable, without a fixed outline, and larger than the figure standing before it. A band of the spectrum we never see becomes the material of the portrait. When a second and a third person enter, the clouds do not sit side by side — they merge into one formation that belongs to no one and cannot be made alone. The screen holds a threshold: between visible and invisible wavelengths, between a body as outline and a body as field, between the hallway and the space that opens behind the glass.

FORMLITH, 2014/2026 — a single person standing before a tall black screen in a dim concrete corridor; on the screen their body appears as a violet and magenta thermal particle cloud with porous, dissolving edges rather than a mirror image — Single presence — the body is rendered as an infrared cloud that extends past the boundary of the skin.

FORMLITH, 2014/2026 — three people standing before a monumental black screen on which their thermal fields have merged into a single luminous violet, magenta and white filamentary formation — Merged field — when several people are detected, the separate presences resolve into one emergent formation.

FORMLITH, 2014/2026 — installation study of a monumental freestanding black slab screen, roughly three and a half metres high, standing in the concrete ground-floor hallway of a university science building, showing a violet thermal figure while a passerby pauses at a distance — Installation study — the work is proposed for everyday circulation space rather than a gallery, at the scale of a standing slab.

Monolith / Interface

The form of FORMLITH refers deliberately to the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): an opaque object that gives nothing away, and around which people gather, photograph, reach out and speculate. Its power in the film is that it cannot be read. Meaning arrives only as projection — whatever the people standing in front of it bring to it.

FORMLITH inverts that relation. The surface remains dark and unreadable until a body approaches, and then it answers with that body's own heat. The visitor is no longer confronting an object; they are the content of it. What was a screen for projection becomes an interface — and the unknown it mediates is not extraterrestrial but physiological, the part of ourselves we cannot ordinarily see.

Astronauts gathered around the monolith on the lunar surface in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

An astronaut reaching out to touch the surface of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The monolith standing in the neoclassical room in the closing sequence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Cinematic reference — film stills from 2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (MGM). Shown here as a conceptual reference only; not documentation of FORMLITH, and no affiliation with the film or its rights holders is implied.

How the work behaves

A depth and thermal/infrared sensor registers arrival. The screen wakes and derives a particle field from emitted heat rather than from a camera image, so the visitor never appears as a likeness. Small physical movements are amplified: a step becomes a drift of the whole field, a raised arm a plume.

Physical / virtual threshold

After a few seconds in the dark, near-spaceless field, the visualization opens into a rendered architecture — a sequence of rooms and thresholds the visitor moves through by moving in the hallway. The flat surface stops behaving like a picture plane and starts behaving like a doorway.

Shared presence

With several bodies present, the individual clouds merge and generate a new formation closer in behaviour to weather systems, fractals and attractors than to overlapping silhouettes. Presence becomes relational: the image belongs to no single person and cannot be produced alone.

Where The Frontier Within and AutonoME enclose a visitor inside a responsive room, FORMLITH stays outside the body and in public: a flat, architectural interface encountered in passing, where the encounter is with other people as much as with the machine.

Metaverses lineage

FORMLITH emerged from metaverses, the research project Hannes Bend began in October 2014 as an artist-in-residence at the University of Oregon, working between the Institute of Neuroscience and the Materials Science Institute. That work examined how patterns and wavelengths in visual stimuli correspond to states of attention, calm and perception — a question pursued through neuroaesthetics, mindfulness research and computational imaging, and carried here into a public work addressed to whoever happens to walk past it.

The body does not end at the skin. What appears when a machine is asked to show the part of us we cannot see?

Technical context

The proposal assumes depth and thermal/infrared sensing at the top edge of the slab, real-time particle rendering driven by the heat map, and a rendered architectural scene entered after sustained presence. It is specified for everyday circulation space — a hallway, an atrium — rather than a gallery, so that the first audience is whoever is passing through.

FORMLITH, 2014/2026 — a particle figure of violet light standing at the edge of a black field, facing a receding sequence of rendered architectural rooms and doorways lit in magenta and lavender — Threshold — after activation, the black field opens into a rendered architecture the visitor moves through.

Evidence & scope

Concept: 2014, within the metaverses research project; documented in a 2015 midpoint review
Visualization: 2026, generative image models
Status: Virtual realization — the installation was never built or exhibited
Classification: Interactive installation · screen-based public artwork · thermal / infrared imaging · speculative interface
Medium: AI-generated image
Cinematic reference: 2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968 — conceptual reference only
Collection: Virtual Realizations

Virtual realization · Original concept 2014 · Digitally visualized 2026 · Unrealized installation