For Satellite (2024), I served as the creative technologist responsible for designing and implementing the custom control systems that govern the installation’s smart glass and lighting. I developed the hardware and software infrastructure that synchronizes the aquariums’ shifting transparency, internal illumination, and temporal rhythms, enabling the glass to transition between opaque and transparent states in carefully choreographed cycles. This system allows the work to reveal and conceal living organisms and debris over time, creating a sense of measurement, breath, and duration without relying on literal clocks. My role was to translate the conceptual framework of the piece into a reliable, site-specific technological system that operates continuously within the restaurant environment while preserving the subtle, atmospheric qualities essential to Huyghe’s living, evolving narrative.
From the Press release:
Satellite, a major new work by Pierre Huyghe, opens in East Williamsburg this fall.
Commissioned by Lonti Ebers, Satellite will be the centerpiece of Zoli, a new restaurant helmed by chef Ned Baldwin on the campus of Amant.
This fall, Pierre Huyghe will unveil a major, site-specific work at Zoli, a new restaurant and bar on the campus of Amant, the contemporary art center founded by Lonti Ebers in East Williamsburg. The worak extends one of his most celebrated bodies of practice, the aquariums, by generating new worlds within them.
The work, entitled Satellite (2024), is the artist’s first and only triptych of aquariums, and the largest piece of this kind he has created to date. It responds directly to the site which is adjacent to Newtown Creek, a tributary of the East River. Having historically been one of the most heavily trafficked waterways in New York City, it is consequently one of the most toxic industrial sites in the country.
Composed of three aquarium tanks in a row, perched atop the restaurant's bar and visible from the street, , the work divides the landscape into three distinct scenes. Together they create parallel narratives — moments in time coexisting simultaneously.
In the central tank, a volcanic rock floats unnaturally, a gravitational aberration above the seabed, evoking the image of an abiogenesis.
Just below it, and in all three tanks an unidentifiable waste objects, a reconstruction of debris found in the creeks and canals of Brooklyn, cast their profiles on the glass. Living organisms hide and grow on these fragments, in filtered sand deposited over the objects.
The tank on the left contains living fossils, including horseshoe crabs, preserved in their form for half a billion years. A stellar LED soft light appear. The water rises and falls with symbolic tides, as the glass turns transparent or opaque, evoking a clock-like rhythm without measuring time. The tank on the right contains genetically modified organisms—bio-engineered, designed living products created for ornamental purposes. These are trademarked under the brand GloFish and are sold as branded packages.
The front and back glass panels of the three tanks made of smart glasse, on the contrary, shift from transparent to opaque, revealing or concealing what occurs inside. This switching produces a rhythm evoking a measuring instrument, the passage of time, or something more elusive, like separating one large event into various scenes – moment in times within the same origin.
This aquarium unfolds like a fictional narrative, composed of diverse sensibilities. Living organisms, from ancient living fossils to genetically modified Glofish, inhabit each tank, seamlessly combining past and future and questioning presupposed notions of evolution.
August 2025
Client
Pierre Huyghe Studio / Lonti Ebers
Role
Creative Technologist
Tech
Python, Raspberry Pi, DMX, Gauzy Smartglass Controller