Returning to Milan Design Week for 2025, Google once again collaborated with light and water artist Lachlan Turczan for Making the Invisible Visible, an immersive exploration of the ways in which art and design can be seen as acts of alchemy that bring ideas to life.

With Making the Invisible Visible, Google sought to show how abstract ideas can be translated into tangible forms to be felt and experienced, through Turczan’s artwork, and the design of Google’s latest hardware products.

On entering the exhibition, visitors saw Turczan’s latest artwork, Lucida (I-IV), a series of spaces sculpted entirely out of light. These luminous vessels ripple through mist, forming shifting environments that blur the boundaries between the tangible and intangible. Light – typically a fleeting, ephemeral presence – takes on a material permanence, transforming into something that can be touched, inhabited, and felt, bending, flowing, and responding with fluid dynamism to the interaction of the viewer.

Making the Invisible Visible marks the second time that Turczan and Google have collaborated for Milan Design Week, with the two having previously worked together for Shaped By Water in 2023 after Ivy Ross, Google’s Chief Design Officer of Consumer Devices, became inspired by Turczan’s artwork.

Speaking exclusively to arc magazine, the artist recalled his early interactions with Google, and how this blossomed into the collaborative relationship they now have.

“Ivy Ross first saw my work in 2021, when I was making sculptures with water and mirrors. The Google team was heavily drawing inspiration from my work, and at a certain point, they had so many images of my work on their inspiration boards, that Ivy said ‘I have to meet this person’. She reached out to me and commissioned me for the collaboration in 2023. They found something that they liked in my work, and then created a story around it. In 2023 it was perfect, as they had designed a watch that was inspired by the form of a water drop, so formally there were strong similarities with my work.

“Fast forward to 2025, I’ve been doing a lot of work out in the landscape, creating light sculptures in the open air, where I found bodies of water, and I would arrest light through either the silt in the water, or steam coming out of hot springs. I shared some of this work with Ivy, and she asked how I could bring this inside and share it in a gallery or museum context.

“I had some sketches that I thought were possible, but it required a significant amount of time to engineer it. We made a couple of small maquettes and prototypes, and Ivy gave us the go ahead – she is the kind of person who really knows what the world is wanting, so it’s incredible to have her as a sounding board for creating this work.”

Through his landscape work, Turczan explains that each piece was set up in a way that would appear from a specific vantage point, where the focal length of the human eye would create an illusion where the conical aspect of the light would become parallel.

“As things come closer to you, in your vision they flare out, so it required a very specific stance to soften your vision. Therefore, this thing that you know to be immaterial, that you know to be made of light and coming at you in a space can take on the feeling of a monumental thing that goes infinitely into the sky and appears to be architectural, because of it being parallel.

“Traditionally, light is either diverging or converging; it is either illuminating something, or creating an image. We rarely ever have the opportunity to experience parallel or laminar light. In the same way that when you turn on a faucet and the water coming out can appear completely glassy, with the molecules moving in the same direction, we had that idea of coaxing light into a regular and consistent pattern.”

Complementing this visual effect, another integral facet of Lucida (I-IV) was its interactivity, and the way that, by passing through these laminal curtains of light, the viewer could shape and impact the “flow” of the beams.

Turczan continues: “Once we had the opportunity to experience parallel light, the next step was how do we interface with and move through it? Ivy wanted the piece to be responsive, to be something that we could engage with and physically interact with.

“The ability to feel like you’re touching the light, reaching out to this substance that you know, logically, is immaterial, but that moves and makes sound based off of your motion, is responding to you, these are triggers and cues that trick the brain into thinking that you’re dealing with physical mass.

“I’m really inspired by the Light and Space movement that came out of Southern California in the 1960s – artists like Helen Pashgian, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell. These artists had a focus on perception and on immateriality, how light inhabits a space, how light can shape space and define experience. However, with their work, it was either passive or you enter a realm that the artist has created, without being an active participant, other than through your perception.

“I have quite a complicated relationship with interactive art, which has often felt to me like you press a button, and then this thing does something, which isn’t natural. If I can touch it, that is the highest ideal of interaction – the idea that you can create an object or a substance. That became my ethos for this: to imbue light with physical characteristics, so that it’s almost less of an interactive art piece and more of a meta material, if you will, this idea of pushing the qualities of substance through the way that you engineer it, becoming a huge dance and balance of optics and software and so many technical things, but at the end of the day, you have this physical object.”

To bring this piece of art to life, Turczan purchased eight tonnes of optical grade acrylic – the kind used in aquariums, which were then shaped by a military-grade fabricator into six ocular lenses, each measuring six feet in diameter.

“If you imagine a triangular prism, we took that and wrapped it around – the technical term for this would be an annular optic.”

Through these annular optics, laser projections create the kind of caustic effect that one sees when light passes through water, but extruded in space – a juxtapositional marriage of nature and technology.

The installation formed the first part of a wider exhibition from Google; from Lucida (I-IV), the experience shifted from artistic expression to the practice of design, as guests moved into new spaces that highlighted the story behind a particular Google hardware device.

Each experience looked to illuminate how an abstract idea can be translated into a tangible form – from its Nest thermostat, to its new earbuds, which used laser scans of ears to create its most accurately modelled earphones to date.

Although treated as a separate commission, Turczan believes that there are links in approach that connect the artwork to the wider exhibition. “The way the narrative is told is that there are these technologies of human reciprocity that are part and parcel of the work that Google does – the use of software and lasers, as examples. And then the work that I do uses similar technologies in an artistic way. Although we’re not using any Google technology in the work that I do, there’s a parallel in our principles. The wider piece therefore acts as a celebration of the ways in which art and design are both articulations of similar concepts.”

The installation was one of the highlights of Milan Design Week, with enormous queues for the majority of the week, and looking back at the event, Turczan says that he is humbled by the feedback that he has received, and he is excited about where to take it in the future.

“We had an incredible response. It has been remarkable to see how much the work resonates with people,” he says. “Where I want to take this work is to have this be architecturally integrated, to create opportunities where this is situated within the framework of a space, and can affect people of the long haul in a deep and meaningful way.

“We’re also in talks with museums, light art festivals, and other shows to take it on the road. We’re speaking to many different institutions to have the experience of these sculptures and get them out there. That’s the incredible thing about Milan Design Week, it’s a huge sounding to the world – everyone pays attention to it, so it has been a dream come true to have this premier there alongside Google.”

www.lachlanturczan.com