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A visitor stands inside a sweeping, curved landscape of overlapping wooden shingles, seen through translucent hanging curtains
Photo: Zita Oberwalder

Dafne's Skin

Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy · 2025 · Architecture and Human Augmentation, ETH Zurich, and MAEID

An enlarged fragment of skin from the myth of Dafne, made of wooden tiles, whose surface slowly changes under a robotically applied living patina.

Dafne's Skin is a living exhibition at the Triennale Milano: an enlarged fragment of the skin of Dafne, the nymph of Greek myth who turned into a laurel tree. The surface is made of wooden tiles, and over the course of the exhibition it slowly changes as four robotic "geographers" apply a patina of microalgae and bacteria, guided by sensors that monitor the environment in real time.

How COMPAS was used

The wooden tiles were assembled with augmented reality fabrication, built on COMPAS XR.

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