POLIS Interactive is what happens when two engineers decide that being good at one thing is a limitation. Daniel Goodwin and Broose Wilcoxon founded the Austin studio after graduating from UT Austin, and they describe themselves as having no defined core competency on purpose: they would rather tackle whatever hard, interesting problem a project throws at them, whether that means writing software, wiring electrical systems, or running a digital fabrication shop. Their stated mission is a polite way of saying they want the technical stuff to feel like play.
Make the usually esoteric and arcane available to the general public.
They launched by applying to Austin's 2018 Creek Show and going, in their words, all out on their first piece. For the show's tenth anniversary in 2024 they came back with Waller Creek High, a "School for Extraordinary Fish": injection-molded fish made from recycled materials and suspended over the creek, each one touch-activated to send a pulse of color down the line. More than 60 percent of the fish were later rehomed as lamps, which tells you something about how POLIS thinks. Art that people want to take home is still art.
Few studios have built more exhibits at Hopscotch. In San Antonio, Color Therapy is the quiet one: a 12-bit RGB exhibit with more than 4,000 possible color combinations, drawing on chromotherapy, the old idea that colored light can heal and rebalance. It rewards standing still. Diodic Daydream is the loud one, at least visually: 30,000 LEDs glowing through 120,000 translucent balls in 2,100 cubic feet of space. You wade in, the light shifts and pulses around you, and it is easy to see why it is one of the most popular exhibits at Hopscotch. In Portland, their Augmented Normalcy once let guests stand on artificial turf and watch themselves from impossible angles in VR.
Chromotherapy has roots in ancient Egypt and Greece. POLIS made it feel contemporary without losing the core idea.
