Ice Milling with Jussi Ängeslevä

Ice Milling, proposed by the media artist, designer and educator Jussi Ängeslevä and developed with the research team, AATB (Andrea Anner and Thibault Brevet), Alain Bellet and Martin Hertig, is one of the six experiments of A Third Hand – Creative Applications for Robotics, a research project at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, Switzerland.

Together they programmed a robot that mills clear ice into caustic lenses: a UR10 arm with a milling spindle carves a block of ice into a computed geometry that refracts the light of an attached flashlight into an image on the wall. The experiment built on Jussi Ängeslevä’s earlier research into caustic lenses made from natural ice, with Berlin University of the Arts, the University of Lapland and EPFL.

Jussi Ängeslevä and AATB later took the ice milling further for Pinnannousu, for the Sapporo International Art Festival 2024.