FORMLITH

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?

The work takes the form of a tall black screen — dormant, unlit, deliberately monolithic — that shows nothing until someone approaches it. A depth and thermal/infrared sensor registers the arriving body, and the screen wakes. What returns is not a reflection. The visitor appears as a cloud of particles derived from emitted heat: porous, unstable, without a fixed outline, and larger than the figure standing in front of it. An ordinarily invisible band of the electromagnetic spectrum becomes the material of the portrait.

When a second or third person enters the field, the individual clouds do not sit side by side. They merge and generate a new formation, closer in behaviour to weather systems, fractals and attractors than to two silhouettes overlapping. Presence becomes relational: the image on the screen belongs to no single person, and cannot be produced alone. After a few seconds in this dark, near-spaceless field, the visualization opens into a rendered architecture — a sequence of rooms and thresholds in which small physical movements are amplified into large spatial ones.

FORMLITH is a work about thresholds: between visible and invisible wavelengths, between a physical hallway and a virtual room, between the body as outline and the body as field, between one presence and several. Its title joins the emerging language of virtual "formations" to the monolith of Kubrick's 2001 — an object that does nothing until it is approached, and then changes the terms of what can be perceived.

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.

Originally conceived within the metaverses research project initiated in 2014 and documented in a 2015 midpoint review, FORMLITH is presented here as a 2026 archival realization. The images on this page are visualizations of a work that was never built.