Fabricated Mirage
Fabricated Mirage
Fabricated Mirage
Category:
Category:
Technical Studies
Technical Studies
Service:
Service:
Research & Environmental Intervention
Research & Environmental Intervention
Year:
Year:
2024
2024
Credits
Stefan Lengen
Design Tutor
Ivan Chan
Design Technology Supervisor
Ben Spong
Design Tutor
Fabricated Mirage is an installation that constructs a man-made optical illusion at architectural scale—a mirage that flickers, shimmers, and vanishes through the precise manipulation of air and heat.By conjuring a disappearing environment through the artificial waste heat, the work positions itself between material presence and atmospheric absence—a ghost structure born from the entropy of the digital sublime.
Fabricated Mirage is an installation that constructs a man-made optical illusion at architectural scale—a mirage that flickers, shimmers, and vanishes through the precise manipulation of air and heat.By conjuring a disappearing environment through the artificial waste heat, the work positions itself between material presence and atmospheric absence—a ghost structure born from the entropy of the digital sublime.
In a time when global data production is exploding, the physical footprint of information has become paradoxically invisible. Data centres, the silent cores of digital life, emit vast quantities of residual heat—an environmental byproduct largely ignored. This project embraces the absurdity of this condition: if heat is inevitable, could it be composed, shaped, and aestheticised into something fleetingly beautiful?
In a time when global data production is exploding, the physical footprint of information has become paradoxically invisible. Data centres, the silent cores of digital life, emit vast quantities of residual heat—an environmental byproduct largely ignored. This project embraces the absurdity of this condition: if heat is inevitable, could it be composed, shaped, and aestheticised into something fleetingly beautiful?
By controlling temperature differentials between surface and air, Fabricated Mirage generates the refractive conditions necessary to produce a visible mirage—the same optical distortion one might encounter above a hot desert floor. Here, it is not nature but technology that generates illusion. The architecture itself becomes unstable: forms dissolve, distances warp, and solidity gives way to shimmer.
By controlling temperature differentials between surface and air, Fabricated Mirage generates the refractive conditions necessary to produce a visible mirage—the same optical distortion one might encounter above a hot desert floor. Here, it is not nature but technology that generates illusion. The architecture itself becomes unstable: forms dissolve, distances warp, and solidity gives way to shimmer.
