As pedestrians pass a graffiti-covered storefront at the corner of 13th Street and Avenue A, bursts of color and motion animate the gallery walls inside, visible through large windows even after hours. Shapes collide, scatter, and regroup, responding to an unseen terrain and to actions initiated directly from the sidewalk.

Bounce unfolds within Rabbit Rabbit, a small project space in New York’s East Village. Inside, the gallery walls are lined with an accumulated landscape of OSB panels, scraps, and offcuts left from previous exhibitions. This informal debris forms a physical terrain—uneven, layered, and ad hoc—that becomes the ground condition for a digital simulation.

Projected across the space, a physics-based animation of circles and rectangles navigates this terrain, bouncing, sliding, and stacking against both the physical remnants and one another. Four projectors seamlessly map the simulation across the walls, creating a hybrid environment where virtual and physical elements continuously interact.

Interaction extends beyond the interior. Arcade-style buttons mounted on the exterior wall allow passersby to add or remove shapes in real time. Each press immediately alters the projection inside, transforming the storefront into a playable display embedded in the street.

Built using a custom physics engine in Processing and mapped through TouchDesigner, the system remains largely invisible. What emerges is an intuitive, public encounter—one where scraps become terrain, data becomes material, and the city itself becomes part of the interface.

Collaborators: Davies Toews Architecture
Photos: Alan Tansey

More about the process:
Setup and software
Photos of the opening