Overheating is part of an ongoing series titled Fault Tolerance, which looks at data centers as contemporary cathedrals.

The sculpture recreates a small, grotesque figure from the facade of Notre-Dame de Paris in Blender. After building the base model, I exported it as an .OBJ file, and intentionally corrupted the data by directly editing the code. When the model was reimported into Blender, the corrupted data created artifacts and distortions throughout the form. I then remeshed the sculpture to make it printable.

The final sculpture was printed in ASA and coated with a low-temperature ceramic Cerakote finish. The material treatment exposes the object to heat in a way that references the burning of the cathedral itself.

The accompanying simulation is a point cloud reconstruction of Notre Dame created from crowdsourced reconstruction data gathered after the fire. With help from Harvey Moon from Spectra Studio, I used a temperature output dataset from Kaggle to drive the simulation. Over the course of a one-hour loop, rising temperature values gradually degrade the spire.

June 5 - June 27, 2025

Willshire Online | Los Angeles, CA

Documentation:

Photo: Christopher Wormald | @christopherwphoto