Details
Tessel wanted their showroom wall to move without turning into a screensaver. We took the tile set they already manufacture and drove it with slow noise, so the motion reads as the same product rearranging itself rather than an animation playing on top of it.
Client
Tessel Studio
year
2023
Constraint
Motion the tiles could actually make
The motion had to come from the real tile geometry. Nothing invented, nothing that could not be laid by hand.
That ruled out most easing and all of the obvious transitions.
Tessel make glazed tiles in four shapes. Every state the wall passes through has to be an arrangement a tiler could lay tomorrow, which means the piece is not interpolating between pictures — it is walking between valid layouts.
Easing was the first casualty. A tile cannot sit halfway between two positions, so the motion is stepped, and the rhythm of those steps became the only expressive control left to us.
The constraint sounded like a limitation when the studio first described it. Three weeks in, it was the reason the piece looked like nothing else in the showroom.
My Process
Research
We measured the studio's existing tile set and rebuilt its geometry exactly, including the tolerances. Anything the motion did had to be something a tiler could actually lay.
Brainstorming
Most of the obvious ideas were cut by that one constraint. What survived was slow rearrangement — the same product reorganising itself rather than an animation on top of it.
Prototyping
A single shader drives the whole wall from low-frequency noise. We spent most of the time slowing it down; anything quicker read as a screensaver.
Install
Two projectors edge-blended across six metres, calibrated against the physical tiles on the adjacent wall. The studio reseeds the pattern from a tablet.
Install
Six metres, one shader
Two projectors, edge-blended across six metres, running a single shader.
The studio can reseed the pattern from a tablet, which they do roughly once a week.
Everything runs from a single seed number. Change it and the wall resolves into a different arrangement over about ninety seconds, never repeating within a working day and never landing on a layout that could not be built.
The blend seam sits on a grout line. That was half a day of measuring on site and it is the only reason six metres reads as one surface rather than two projections.
Tessel now reseed it before client visits and have started photographing the states they like. Two of them have since been laid as real walls.
