23Springs

An 8K canvas in an office lobby, running since August 2025, that nobody turns on in the morning or off at night. It runs on the logic of the building's elevator: through the day the lobby arrives at world after world drawn from nature, and the worlds respond to the people passing through.

Two requirements that pull against each other

The brief wanted resolution and interactivity at the same time. One machine cannot render 8K of live content, so the canvas is split across four render nodes. The moment you do that, every generative element on the canvas becomes a problem: particles seeded independently on four machines drift apart, and what the lobby gets is four plausible images that do not agree at the seams.

So the particles are not computed where they are drawn. A director machine runs the whole particle system on the GPU in shader, and the four render nodes draw the result. One simulation, four viewports onto it.

Six layers at 8K means images, layer sets, LODs and alpha-channel video that change across the run, so content goes through a CMS built for it.

Frame sync across the nodes, the other half of making four machines look like one, was not my part.

A building that keeps time

The piece runs as a 24-hour clock. Every quarter hour is marked by a small visual and sonic flourish; every hour turns the lobby over into a new world, each moving through Sprout, Growth and Pollinate, the cycle of emergence, development and renewal. The worlds are drawn from natural forms at wildly different scales: a tarpon's scale opening into synchronized swarms, vines twisting into impossible geometries, a monarch's wing becoming a continental migration.