Aubrey Birdwell

Unit Cell is a modular sculptural system developed by Aubrey Birdwell over the past decade, first explored through static crystalline forms in 2014 and revisited in 2019. In 2025, the work was re-staged as a site-specific projection mapping installation for the Georgetown Steam Plant Science Fair, where crystalline modules became projection surfaces for algorithmically generated Voronoi patterns, animated in real time to echo the distressed paint of the 1906 steam plant.

Projection mappings become haunting ghost-like images where color fields become blown out in contrast to the rough reality and textures of their surroundings.

Across its iterations, Unit Cell functions as a research space for Birdwell, probing the tension between order and disorder, structure and disintegration. The crystalline sculptures establish geometric regularity—sharp facets, repetition, architectural weight—while projected textures destabilize them through shifting cracks, vibrating color fields, and procedural distortions. These arrangements, sited in turbine tunnels and abandoned shafts, awaken latent form in disused architecture, merging still-life composition with algorithmic animation.

Foregrounding Birdwell’s current trajectory, Unit Cell operates as an adjustable platform. In addition to being able to scale the crystal fragments in size and quantity, parameters such as cell density, crack thickness, rate of degeneration, and palette are allow site-specific adaptation. At Georgetown, the steam plant’s weathered walls became both subject and object, folded into a digital portrait that binds sculpture and algorithm, static structure and ephemeral surface.