Upcoming Talk: Ghost Prints from a Broken Magnet

Hackaday Superconference 2025 | October 31 - November 2
Pasadena, California

I'm excited to present my latest project at this year's Hackaday Superconference—a speculative art-science exploration that bridges 19th-century photography, ancient geomagnetic catastrophes, and post-digital imaging.

Ghost Prints from a Broken Magnet: Cyanotypes and the Laschamps Excursion

What if photography could outlast electricity?

This 35-minute talk introduces a project that treats cyanotype—an iron-based photographic process from the 1840s—as both a memory device and a tool for imagining planetary-scale collapse. Inspired by the Laschamps Excursion (~41,000 years ago), when Earth's magnetic field briefly collapsed and auroras lit the tropics, I've built custom imaging machines to simulate these ancient skies.

The Technology

Pole Drift Arm: A programmable gantry system that sweeps high-power UV LEDs across cyanotype paper, controlled by ESP32 microcontrollers. The device mimics the movement of auroral ovals and pole wandering, encoding motion into directional exposure streaks and gradient arcs.

Aurora Caustic Box: A lightfield generator using flickering UV LED arrays and caustic diffusion to project shifting interference patterns. Motorized optical layers create veins, glints, and caustic structures—like frozen light weather burned into iron.

The Concept

Rather than creating traditional frame-by-frame animation, each cyanotype becomes a "fossil" of synthetic auroral weather—capturing temporally complex light fields that encode direction, intensity, and motion over time. These aren't representations but material records of events that never occurred, yet might again.

The Connection

The talk explores links between Neanderthal fire pits that locked in reversed magnetism 41,000 years ago and modern cyanotypes that use the same iron chemistry to record synthetic skies. As Earth's magnetic poles accelerate their current drift, what kinds of images survive when digital systems collapse?

Talk Details

Event: 2025 Hackaday Superconference
Dates: October 31 - November 2, 2025
Location: Supplyframe DesignLab, Pasadena, CA
Address: 61 S Fair Oaks Ave #200, Pasadena, CA 91105

Talk Structure

• Opening Provocation: The poles are moving again—what's at stake?
• Scientific Context: The Laschamps Excursion and geomagnetic reversals
• Cyanotypes as Resilient Memory: Iron-based imaging beyond the digital
• Device Demonstrations: How the Pole Drift Arm and Aurora Caustic Box work
• Historical Connections: Prehistoric pigments, ochre handprints, and iron chemistry
• Post-Digital Speculation: What survives when the cloud burns?