Hey ✌️ I'm Chris

CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST · COLOGNE

I build things people can play with.

Interactive installations, physical games, and unexpected effects. Made with code, electronics, and a lot of hands-on building.

Explore my projects Get in touch

Selected projects

Code meets the physical world.

An on-screen race. Real-world water, fog, and pool noodles.

Game modification / Electronics / Festival installation

A walk-in spaceship where strangers cooperate, sabotage, and launch.

Python / ESP32 / Interactive storytelling

The Confessional

A confessional box at Walden Festival 2026 where visitors confess their sins to a local AI priest, who grants absolution - and forwards the sins, anonymized and retold in an angel’s voice, to the Holy Toilet.
The Palapian's Spaceship

An interactive, networked spaceship you can actually board: players complete (or sabotage) missions across a dozen physical interfaces - buttons, joysticks, LED boards, sensors, etc - to either launch the ship or doom it, with everything driven by a Python/ESP/Unity stack. It’s modular, auto-resets regularly, and scales to festival crowds without manual babysitting.
Tux-Kart with Real-Life Powerups

Festival Installation where two people play OSS-Mariokart, but instead of Koopas the in-game items squirt water or fog at the opponent or hit with the Poolnudelschlagapparat.
CAD and 3D-Printing

Having learned my ways on Theseus’ Anet A8 and now running a boringly reliable Bambu P1S, I use 3D printing and self-taught CAD as basic infrastructure for most of my hardware projects, some of which are listed here.

👉 More physical projects

Podcast Episode on LLMs for Software Engineering

In this (german-language) episode of Code for Thought, Carina and I discuss how large language models can realistically support Research Software Engineering - from paper-code matching to a sober look at tool evaluation, limits, and hype vs. practice.
Automatic Meal Recognition

An automated self-checkout system that recognizes meals on canteen trays using machine learning.
Siddata Study Assistant

A Stud.IP-Plugin to recommend relevant university courses using machine learning
Masterthesis: Explainable Course Recommendation

For this thesis, I created a Conceptual Space from Course Descriptions for explainable Recommendation, in a highly performant pipeline on the university-grid.

👉 More digital projects

Let's talk about installations, playful interfaces, or working together.

Chris Stenkamp · Cologne