This year, our Walden floor at Zugvögel became Santo Nido: a church dedicated to a phoenix sect. Stained-glass windows, holy birds, an AI confessional, and a tower-clock that goes wild with the music. A lot of religious nonsense, and so much love for detail.
Building a church
We were a crew of 20, and I spent four weeks on site. As co-construction lead, I helped plan the church and built a big part of it. Learning from last year, we went for “Quadratisch, Praktisch, Gut” again: a simple main structure that goes up quickly, leaving us time for all the lovely little things.
And this is what I love about our crew: how differently we work, and how well it comes together. Two professional fresco painters painted the facade, and holy shit, we were overwhelmed. Then another crew member mapped its details with projections, bringing it alive at night. Somebody made six huge church windows and a rose window telling the phoenix’s story, using markers, hot glue and acrylic paint. Add a fog-spitting phoenix outside, another glowing behind the DJ, an interactive seesaw and a synth organ… so many different people’s favourite things becoming one floor.
Making dumb lights smart
Once the structure was done, I added the fun lights: torches, Victorian street lamps, window lighting, etc. These joined our network through WLED or my relay-boxes. I also helped program these and the stage lighting in TouchDesigner, using MIDI pads and an Art-Net node, and spent plenty of the festival VJ-ing and creating more effects live.
My favourite little example: our Weihrauchfass. We had something that looked exactly like a church incense burner. Add a hose from a small fog machine and a motor borrowed from the Poolnudelschlagapparat, and suddenly we had a swinging, smoking incense burner controllable from the VJ desk. I love making dumb things smart.
A clock that goes wild
A church obviously needs a tower-clock, and I’ve wanted to build a huge party clock for ages. My ongoing eight-hand Weasley clock project provided the excuse to finally do it.
Ours is 80 cm across, with 3D-printed hands and gearbox, an RGBW NeoPixel ring, and an Ethernet-connected ESP controlled from the VJ desk. It is completely controllable and can do anything from slowly running forwards or backwards with the correct hour-to-minute ratio, or let both hands go completely wild independently, with the LED ring doing anything from fairy lights to strobes.
We even brought the music’s BPM into the network so the clock outside could reflect the energy inside. Though we mostly controlled it manually, because that was more fun. So proud of how this thing turned out.
And a confessional
My other main project was the AI confessional booth. The beautiful wooden booth was a group effort under my lead, and I developed its hardware and software. The hardware evolved steadily, while I was amazed how quickly I could vibe-code the software using my Palapa spaceship codebase as a starting point. The AI priest and its questionable handling of confessions deserve their own page.
There’s so much of me in this floor, well beyond those two projects. We were all incredibly proud, got so many lovely compliments, and Walden was packed again. We might need a bigger church next year.