Augmented Reality installation
In collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology – Institute for Applied Informatics

The interactive augmented reality installation presents a red virtual balloon that adapts in real time to the lighting conditions of the physical space. However, at the points where sharp specular highlights would normally appear, something unexpected occurs: the surface of the balloon dissolves. Reflections are not rendered but digitally erased — the shine refuses its own visibility.

Through the movement of the smartphone — and thus the movement of the viewer — a hollowed, fragmented object gradually emerges. The glossy areas become transparent; the virtual body frays and increasingly loses its form. The real environment penetrates the digital object, revealing the algorithmic fragility of its surface.

The balloon, a symbol of lightness and playful innocence, becomes the site of a media-technological disruption. Drawing on Andrea Cremonini’s reflections on shine — which not only generates desire but simultaneously erases the materiality of its carrier — the work radically reverses this logic: the highlight does not appear; instead, it destroys the surface that would be required to sustain it. It withdraws from vision and refuses visual fulfillment.

In this way, the shiny red balloon poetically and precisely explores the boundaries between physical perception, digital simulation, and the unreliability of technical image spaces. Shine is not staged as an aesthetic climax, but as a moment of disappearance — as a disturbance that dissolves the object itself.