Point Form Wave

Point Form Wave (2025) simultaneously mimics and dismantles systems of mapping, perception, and spatial legibility. A grid of red lasers rotates across the surface of a transparent painter’s drop sheet that is suspended just above the floor. Fans agitate the sheet from below, causing the once two-dimensional surface to become a complex, time-varying topography characterized by undulating ripples and transient waveforms. This entirely artificial scene mirrors a natural waterline environment—an uncanny simulation of nature through constructed means.

The perpetual chance-performance of  Point Form Wave is driven by its own logic yet echoes satellite imaging and 3D mapping tools used in surveillance and cartography. Like point cloud data—collections of spatial coordinates used to digitally reconstruct three-dimensional forms—the lasers simulate a process of spatial capture. Referencing these virtual datasets, along with Google Earth and spatial modelling, the work underscores the persistent impulse to measure, translate, and digitise our ever-changing geographical landscapes

As the lasers sweep across the surface, they trace the shifting contours—reading but never recording. These chance forms come to look like visualisations of audio wavelengths. The work becomes a perpetual performance, echoing the constant digital processes that attempt to capture the world—yet Point Form Wave never produces an outcome or dataset. Occasionally, the lasers catch a faint line traced on the floor beneath, subtly collapsing distinctions between surface and depth, illusion and index.

The transparent drop sheet acts as both barrier and lens: a membrane that distorts space and destabilises any fixed understanding of place. Moving round the installation becomes quietly disorienting. What appears to be a rational, technical system instead reveals itself as uncertain, performative, and contingent—an apparatus for sensing a world that simultaneously mimics and destabilises logic.