Artist Lachlan Turczan and Google's 'Making the Invisible Visible' at Milan Design Week 2025

Google’s installation at Milan Design Week 2025 promises an immersive spectacle. Following on from 2024’s Making Sense of Colour, Making the Invisible Visible will feature dynamically re-shaped columns of light set within the Garage 21 event space. The installation is the work of artist Lachlan Turczan, the second time he has collaborated with Google’s Ivy Ross, following 2023’s The Shape of Water.

‘We always start from a point of inspiration, something which isn’t always obvious for a tech company,’ Ross explains, ‘and of course this inspiration is completely invisible to consumers.’ Making the Invisible Visible attempts to put a shape to that intangible relationship between creativity, form, the ephemeral and the real world. ‘It’s about turning an abstract idea – ‘light into something’ – into a physical shape,’ Ross says.

Ross crossed paths with Turczan’s work as part of her research into cymatics, the study of sound, vibration and shape. ‘I’ve been studying sound and vibrations for 40 years,’ she says, explaining how this research gives rise to form like the Pixel watch, with its case and face shaped like a water droplet. ‘I was sent a clip of Lachlan’s work at the Rhode Island School of Design,’ she recalls, ‘so I reach out to him. I’m not sure if he believed that a Google executive was contacting him.’

That began a relationship that first bore fruit at Salone in 2023. ‘He’s a very curious person, as am I,’ Ross continues, ‘we connected over that. He’s an artist who needs to execute his ideas with precision.’ For Ross and her team, who are working two to three years ahead of what’s currently on sale, the idea of an installation that captured the creative process was a way to share the process.

‘The fun of these exhibitions is to share some insight as to how we do what we do,’ she continues, ‘for example, using laser light to scan ears in order to shape our earbuds.’ New to the Google hardware line-up is a new thermostat design, a simple form factor that reveals more information as you come closer to it. ‘It’s a bit of magic,’ Ross says.

Capturing this relationship between the fleeting moment and physical form, as well as the impact and influence of humans on the natural world, is the subject of Making the Invisible Visible. ‘We’ve spent the last nine months trying to create sculptures that present light as a physical object, something that can be touched,’ says Lachlan Turczan, ‘we’re taking light and making feel like a solid object.’

To achieve this, Turczan and his team have created a series of custom optics that can project light in a very focused way, controlling the beam so that it doesn’t spread or scatter or diffuse. ‘Imagine a tube of light six feet in diameter and ten feet tall that delineates the space,’ the artist says, ‘we’re trying to imbue light with the characteristic of an object.’

Throughout his career, Turczan has used light to shape and alter spaces, both natural and artificial, documenting the process of these fleeting transformations, often using water to further manipulate the light. ‘My work often starts with an interesting in light and how it can be change. It’s a reaction to the over-digitisation of light,’ he explains, ‘I’ve always been really into a more organic way of working with light – this informed my use of water as a way of shaping and perceiving it.’

Describing his process as ‘allowing technology to interface with nature in different ways,’ Turczan uses a mix of custom-built technology and off-the-shelf theatrical components to build his installations, taking kit like concert-grade projectors out into the natural world.

At Garage 21, Turczan’s installation for Google takes this ethos into the gallery setting. ‘We’ve basically distilled our landscape practice into an installation,’ he says, ‘I like the idea of art existing in a public square.’ It’s a very different proposition creating a piece for a controlled black box environment versus the ever-changing light and weather conditions of the natural world. Indoors, a theatre-grade vaporiser creates a haze of water droplets to highlight the beams and better shape the space.

To achieve the final result, Turczan has once again turned to Google’s Ivy Ross and her team. Ross, the company’s Chief Design Officer of Consumer Devices, selected the artist’s work for the 2023 installation, and wanted to take it further. ‘Her support has been instrumental to my practice,’ he says, ‘she encouraged taking it into a gallery space with a heightened, more concentrated look.’

For Turczan, the opportunity to control the entire environment over a period of several days rather than document an ephemeral moment gives him a chance to see people react with his work in real time. ‘It takes on a whole new lift of its own,’ he says, ‘there are always surprises along the way. Everyone wants to reach out and touch the light, which is a small victory.’

The exhibition in Milan includes a section on Google’s hardware evolution, tracing the development of the new thermostat and how its form factor was arrived at, shaped by concerns for material, usability, interaction, technology and the environment. It’s joined by a display of Google’s entire hardware portfolio.

Just as Turczan manifests light into form, are we getting closer to the point where hardware itself dissolves into nothing? ‘When I started, we all had this vision of physical technology going away completely,’ Ross admits, ‘but what we have to ask is ‘what serves us?’.’ Citing the way the new thermostat blends into the background and only becomes apparent when you need it, Ross believes that the future will hold a mix of physical and intangible. The job becomes finding the most beautiful way of blending in.’

‘I’m the orchestra conductor for this incredible team of designers,’ Ross concludes, ‘we’re craftsmen. We all hope the sensorial nature of life doesn’t go away. As humans, ‘we’re always going to crave the tactile and the textural. As long as consumers still want that, there’ll aways be a resonance in craft and the appreciate of physical objects.’

Making the Invisible Visible, Lachlan Turczan, April 7 through 13, 2025, at Garage 21, Via Archimede, 26, 20129 Milano

LachlanTurczan.com, @LachlanTurczan, Design.Google