It started in a smelly, dirty creek.
An art installation, a desperate attempt to not enter bankruptcy, and a whirlwind lesson in manufacturing
Polis Interactive
We’re Daniel Goodnguyen and Broose Wilcoxon, the Austin artists and engineers behind Polis Interactive . We make things that bring people together through art and technology
Our first Creek Show was in 2018. Fresh out of UT, we applied on a whim and built Ambedo ßeta , an installation where Creek Monster scientists translated human speech into light. It was super fun and set us off on our questionable art career!
Public art, gallery installations, and getting acquired once or twice followed. We are now back in full swing!
A school for
Extraordinary fish!
For Waterloo Greenway’s tenth anniversary Creek Show, we returned with Waller Creek High: A School for Extraordinary Fish . A school of blow-molded fish sculptures made from recycled materials swooped above the creek, showing off their mastery of the language of light.
The student council led the school in luminous recitations. Headmaster Creek Monster watched over the graduating class. Humans were invited to enjoy the performance.
We wanted to accomplish three goals with the piece: make a good installation, not go broke, and not generate a lot of wast. Our solution was to design the fish as individual lights to become lamps after the show!
FISH LAMPS
Before the show, lamp-making was still a collection of plans: stands, bases, electronics, software, housings, oh my! The first adoption drive found homes for over 60% of the 2024 graduating class. We were thrilled to hit our goals of "not loosing money on the installation" and "having enough money to fulfill the orders that were placed."
Over the 2025 winter holiday, we designed and redesigned the stands, worked through controller prototypes, and bruned out our retinas staring at color fades. By January, we had turned our shop into a totally legit adoption agency and invited people to collect their new family members.
At this point, we were shocked to find out that people actually liked the lamps—turns out, if you put customers first in your design process, they connect more with it. We've since refined our designs to make them more manufacturable, while retaining quality that made them special in the first place.
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