Offset — SPILL 180

BEANS

SARAH OPPENHEIMER
OFFSET ATTUNEMENT
Oppenheimer and Karwas make art that moves from mechanism to meaning, tuning bodies to space

It is a true honor to host Sarah Oppenheimer at Spill 180. I have followed her work for years, and its clarity has shaped my research and curatorial thinking on embodied perception, the architectural body, and mechanical sensemaking.

I first met Sarah in 2022, early in the morning before our inaugural Yale CCAM Ultra Space Symposium. I was helping Sarah and Dana Karwas prepare for their Manipulations workshop when she asked, with full seriousness: “What is design? Is design even relevant anymore, as a discipline? As a practice?” I froze. That question has powered this space from the beginning.

This piece grows from an ongoing dialogue that has moved through art and architectural discourse, Yale, Harvard GSD, and this year’s Yale CCAM Illuminations Symposium, where Sarah demoed research from Atelier Calder. Watching that arc made her visit to see Dana’s show at Spill 180 feel like a hinge: practice and pedagogy meeting in public.

Oppenheimer’s work studies how spatial permissions are set and reset, treating artworks as apparatus within larger systems where seeing and moving are part of the form. Karwas meets her there with tools that sense and translate gesture.

In the BEANS volume that follows, they start with the potency of the platform guiding a pendulum, dive into the telescope & camera as mechanical eyes, and translate motion into surface and color as a record of time. Control meets feedback; the path writes as it is read.

Sarah Oppenheimer is an artist and architectural manipulator whose practice engages relations between human and non‑human systems. She lives and works in New York and Rotterdam and is Professor in the Practice at the Yale School of Art.

Having Sarah here with Dana is exactly what I hoped Spill 180 would make possible: a sustained exchange between artists and academics, honed by years of interdisciplinary artmaking, intentionally unfolding here.

In Thirty Six Point Eight Hours, Dana Karwas solo exhibition at Spill 180 in Spring 2025, the artist devised a pendulum embedded with an eye. The pendulum swings in a repetitive pattern over a well-known image from the James Webb Space Telescope—an image that, to Karwas, oscillates between the biblical and the banal. The research for this exhibition included the Pendulum Study 2.0 developed collaboration with the Yale CCAM Ultra Space Lab and CCAM Ultra Space Fellow Wai Hin Wong. Source Image: NASA James Webb Telescope.

MECHANICS & GEOMETRY OF MOTION

Dana Karwas: The exhibition started from using a Stewart platform to control a pendulum’s swing. After visiting your GSD class (Oppenheimer was a design critic in architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she led O(perating) S(ystem)1.1 in Spring 2024)... I was thinking about RGB optical tracking or an optical sensor showing positional displacement.

Sarah Oppenheimer: A pendulum has a fixed point from which it swings. As I understand it, a Stewart platform has no fixed center of rotation. Geometrically, imagine a sphere with a center point. A pendulum ideally traces the sphere’s edge. If the center here isn’t fixed, it would never trace a sphere; the geometry changes.

DK: No. Right now it swings in a simple circular orbital motion. I wanted a mechanized pendulum that could follow loops or curves, not just swing. Inertia at the turnaround point was the design problem: when the pendulum stops and reverses, how does that translate to what it’s tracking? I started with a drawing, tried to map the pendulum to it, and settled on the Stewart platform for total control. Then the path began to be released from the page because of inertia and changing directions.

SO: I see…so you’re thinking of a plotted path projected into space. The non‑spherical behavior is interesting: gravitational pulls, cycles, oscillations that visibly decelerate at reversal. How beautiful!

DK: When the pendulum switches direction it momentarily stops. The software can detect that. I tested spiral and zigzag paths; hard angles are compensated in real space, so the pendulum adds curvature.

SO: What if you had two pendulums coordinated so they never intersect? This could create a fascinating tension..

DK: Two would be amazing. They could be controlled so they never touch.

SO: This raises control questions: Are paths directed by a unidirectional command, or is the system responding to internal variables or chance operations? System feedback might yield unexpected behavior.

DK: Right now it is built as a top down system, with the opportunity to evolve it into a responsive system. I built a Grasshopper model. and I can assign a new path and set a pendulum target; the platform reacts. It could be inverted—there would be mechanical challenges, and the stewart plate would need to figure out where it is, as well as where the pendulum is…. The circle path seems simple but works here. The circular path makes the mechanism legible…I had to stop adding complexity to finish the piece.

SO: Would it be possible to have rotation around a moving center?

DK: The impossible displacement or the error introduced by physical space...is exciting.

The impossible displacement or the error introduced by physical space...is exciting. *

THE MECHANICAL EYE: SENSING, FEEDBACK, PERCEPTION

Sarah Oppenheimer: Can you tell me a bit about the camera?

Dana Karwas: The camera’s blur and directionality help interpret movement. When the pendulum switches direction, it stops briefly. This iteration doesn’t autocorrect, but the camera lets me see the switch and that momentary stop even as time continues.

SO: We feel the deceleration and reversal. If the display is in a separate room, a viewer would see through the “eye,” then encounter the body.

DK: Yes! I love that. We talked about a black‑box room for the screen to disconnect the body and eye. I kept the screens small so the camera and its live feedback wouldn’t dominate the show. Right now it’s a closed loop. I’m curious about more direct human control—actions in the room activating it, some cause and effect. Sometimes the physicality doesn’t match the image; there’s potential to control the system entirely.

SO: Yes, that shift matters.

DK: I considered using light and tracking to show time, but the camera opens a feedback loop. I also thought about Peter Campus–style delays, slowing the feed across multiple screens. I can do it live; in this space I showed a recorded video.

SO: That is fascinating. For me, the camera turns it into a psychic projection: I can occupy that position without being physically inside the object. It recalls Serene Velocity by Ernie Gehr - the footage creates an unexpected reorientation.

Dana Karwas’ pendulum sketches courtesy of the artist.

Materiality, Surface & Color

Dana Karwas: The two pieces flanking the entrance are where my hands are most embedded. They’re dimensional; that’s a safe space for me. I’m not comfortable with figurative work. The divining rod is representational. This was a break from the computer. I worked in two‑hour increments, digging out the piece slowly.

Sarah Oppenheimer: The texture is incredible. If you put sand beneath the pendulum and let it trace a path, the sand becomes the image surface. Off‑center placements would yield different geometries. Topologically you’re generating landscapes. You don’t need the camera for that.

DK: I tried stripes and glittery textures but wanted a blurred, abstract lens‑flare effect, so I used the James Webb Space Telescope image. Originally I planned a steel surface with undulations—a tactile surface rather than an image.

SO: So you are translating a visual medium into a tactile surface?

DK: I routed the pendulum’s camera feed through a secondary system inspired by Priya Natarajan describing light bent by mass—like a basketball pressing into a sheet. It’s color‑coded. The center “eye” is built from 5,000 compressed camera frames, color‑corrected. I encoded directionality: red pulls away from the center; blue pulls opposite. As you rotate, strokes orient. I’m interested in producing texture and form from color systems, not just sampling palettes.

For me, the camera turns it into a psychic projection: I can occupy that position without being physically inside the object. *

Installation Choices, Accessibility & What’s Next

Dana Karwas: We kept the camera monitors small. The circle path made the mechanism accessible. The prototype used a drawn path on a drum you could rotate. The original idea had six printed paths; the pendulum would cycle through them, and sometimes the image and path would sync. There’s more potential in the software than I deployed here. A pendulum usually swings in a plane; now it’s a small circle, which suits what it’s looking at. The technical potential was overwhelming…

Sarah Oppenheimer: When you’re next at MIT, take a look at the cabinet of handmade topological models in the Mathematics Department by the Infinite Corridor. I see them in your system.