ELEN

Speculative design earns its strangeness by being precise about the thing it makes strange. Shadow Creatures gave us the lineage: imaging technologies have always been used to perceive what the eye cannot, from spirit photography to thermal and computational cameras. We took the idea literally and pointed it at the wireless layer.

That decided the project's register. ELEN is not a data visualization with a spooky skin. It is a camera whose subject happens to be the electromagnetic presence of the people and devices in a space, treated with the seriousness the ghost metaphor deserves.

A ghost you invent is decoration. A ghost you measure is an image. The project only became real once the apparitions were driven by the actual radio emissions in the room, so the camera's true sensor is not its lens but a wireless antenna in passive monitor mode.

It listens without connecting to anything, capturing each transmission's signal strength and a device identifier. Those identifiers are sensitive, so they are hashed and salted the moment they arrive and never stored. ELEN reveals presence without surveilling identity, which is the difference between a poetic instrument and a tracking device.

The heart of my work was the translation layer. Each detected signal is normalized and fed into a real-time fluid simulation running in the browser, where it injects particles into a shared turbulent field. Signal strength sets an entity's scale, the number of devices sets the density of the field, and network activity drives how fast it all moves.

The whole pipeline runs live: wireless monitoring feeding a reducer, a backend streaming the camera and the signal state, and a visual layer compositing apparitions over the video at sixty frames a second. Holding that frame rate while signals appeared and dissolved in real time was the engineering that made the illusion convincing.

ELEN is handheld and deliberately physical. You power it from the back, capture a moment or open the gallery from two front buttons, and explore by turning through the space. Motion sensing lets the apparitions hold their place in the room as you move, so scanning feels like looking rather than browsing a screen.

Nicholas designed the retro-futuristic enclosure, a 3D-printed chassis with laser-cut plexiglass and orange accents that reads like a piece of speculative field equipment. Nerea shaped the visual identity and the look of the fluid. My part was making the sensing, the translation, and the hardware hold together in real time without dropping a frame.