I create immersive experiences that combine artistic research, motion and 3D art with interactive systems.

Sixteen years later, with a new generation of coding tools, I brought the birds back, this time as a piece anyone can open from anywhere, looking up at their own patch of sky.

A lot has changed up there. In 2010 there were roughly a thousand active satellites; today there are more than ten times as many, flying alongside tens of thousands of tracked fragments of wreckage and debris. Birds Within follows all of them, around 30,000 objects, from live orbital data. At any moment only a small fraction are above your horizon, and fewer still catch the sunlight and could be seen with the naked eye. The rest pass overhead in the dark.

In satellite-spotting circles, a satellite has long been called a “bird.” Taking that word seriously gives us room to treat the invisible density of our skies as a soundscape and a flock, but also to question the taxonomies we’ve inherited: the capitalist narratives and colonial ambitions now colliding in orbit. Birds Within is an immersive look at the crowded sky above you, a tool to explore and understand it, or simply a way to enjoy its motion.

The deformation logic treats each surface point as a pseudo-biological agent — responding to unknown forces, deterministic rules, growth gradients, and tension fields. The result sits between the engineered and the grown: machine logic expressed through organic form.

Conceived amid the near-future promise of drones over every skyline, Densities borrows the visual language of sci-fi surveillance and advertising to build something at once charming and unsettling — a creature that feeds on our electronic trace, subtle and dumb and always watching. It’s not a warning so much as a curious, garage-science probe into a coming condition: a swarm that renders visible the environmental and informational residue we leave behind simply by existing near our devices, sitting deliberately at the edge of dystopian critique and playful invention.

Started in 2014, the project received one of the VIDA Incentives for Production from the Telefónica Foundation. Conceived as an interactive installation, financial insufficiency pushed it instead into a video installation, shown at venues including Dolorosa Obscura at Berlin’s Schiller Palais in 2017. The ongoing research into drones, privacy, and the obsolescence of human physicality kept opening doors, carrying the project into workshops on drone construction and prototyping — among them one at Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2016.

Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout once imagined a country where the rich bought up all the land until the poor had nowhere left to live — so the state gave them balloons, to live above the ground instead. Satellistica takes that image as a provocation: as urban land grows scarcer and housing drifts toward air and water, satellites start to look like an early, unaccountable precedent for a colonization of the sky. What has been done toward a more democratic airspace — and how might ordinary people reclaim some experience of the satellites already occupying their own domestic sky?

The project unfolded across several parallel tracks. At its core was a creative-coding engine — a modified Java library, adapted for Processing, that extracts satellite position predictions from public TLE data and renders them as 3D visualizations. From that same library came further offshoots, among them Birds Within, which turns the invisible density of satellites and space junk overhead into sound instead of image. A second track built DIY counter-observation tools: antennas, and most visibly a tracking cannon — a motorized gimbal mounted with a green laser, pointed skyward to physically mark a given satellite’s position from the ground. Finally, an educational track carried the whole package — free software, neighborhood-science methods, DIY electronics — into workshops with students, so they could take the project’s tools and build their own.

Designed by one of Berlin’s leading studios, onformative. The project uses a mixed technique of cubic LOD subdivision, particle systems, and layered materials, each Persona portrait responds to the complexity of the data it represents — the denser the cloud, the more fragmented and luminous the figure becomes. An ode to an age where our digital presence becomes so complex, that demands all our attention and responsibility.

Working together with the team at 908, we brought these values to life through immersive, 3D-generated product worlds that highlight both the design philosophy and technical innovation behind MYND — environments where material honesty and acoustic performance are equally visible.