Material Witness
Aug 2026
Artist
A generative projection mapping with a single continously transforming surface.
Material Witness is a generative projection that never stops becoming something else. Leaf veins loosen into a galaxy, tighten into a fingerprint, then spread into brick, ink, sand, marble and skin. There are around thirty textures in the work and not a single cut between them, because there is nothing to cut between: every surface is built from the same small set of underlying forms, so nothing is ever replaced, only re-read.
Somewhere in the drift, scale slips. The microscopic and the macroscopic begin to look like the same thing, and close and far stop being opposites.
The work runs as a real-time WebGL shader in a single browser file, looping continuously and never resolving the same way twice. Every texture is generated mathematically. There are no photographs, no video and no image files anywhere in the piece.
Created for the opening night of Close | Far: Lean In, Step Back, presented by Sameksha Gallery and curated by Yamini Telkar, an evening that also marked the first anniversary of Sameksha Gallery. Projected across the stilt area and glass façade of the Sanatan IILM Centre for Arts and Ideas, New Delhi.
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Material Witness came out of a simple constraint I set for myself: build an entire world of surfaces without importing a single image. Everything you see is generated from six shared building blocks. Two cellular networks, a ring field, a field of points, a rectilinear grid and a directional stripe. A fingerprint and a spiral galaxy are the same ring equation at two settings. Skin pores, mineral bubbles and stars are the same field of points, changed only in whether they sink or rise or glow. Once the system was built that way, morphing between textures stopped being an effect and became a fact of the material.
That is also what made it the right piece for this exhibition. Close | Far asks you to lean in and step back, and the works in the show shift depending on where you stand. The projection took that instruction and refused to let anyone settle at either distance.
Working at the façade scale taught me most of what I learned here. Dark textures that looked rich on a laptop disappeared entirely on a building at night, so the palette was rebuilt around bright and mid-tone grounds. Every parameter was centralised so it could be tuned on site, in the dark, in the hour before the doors opened. That is usually where these works are actually finished.
This continues a line of enquiry I began with SightLines: simple computational systems, running live, made to be legible and beautiful without explaining themselves.
Preview Details
Venue: Sameksha Gallery, Sanatan IILM Centre for Arts and Ideas, New Delhi
Exhibition: Close | Far: Lean In, Step Back
Curated by Yamini Telkar, presented by Sameksha
Featuring Kavita Nayar, Vanita Gupta, Savya Jain and Aman Kumar Bavariya
Exhibition dates: 8 August – 12 September 2026, 11:30 AM – 6:30 PM
Material Witness was projected on opening night, 8 August 2026, from 7:30 to 9:30 PM, across the stilt area and glass façade of the building. The evening also celebrated one year of Sameksha Gallery.
Technical Description
Around thirty procedurally generated textures, all drawn from six shared underlying forms: two cellular networks, a ring field, a point field, a rectilinear grid and a directional stripe.
Rendered in real time as a WebGL fragment shader with two-light shading, specular highlights, ambient occlusion and camera-driven parallax, giving each surface genuine relief and depth.
Runs from a single self-contained HTML file with no server, no install and no login. Continuous loop with no beginning or end, tunable live on site.
Project Gallery
