When thinking about ways to get energy, large infrastructure likely comes to mind. Whether renewable or fossil fuel based, our power comes from massive production facilities. Wind turbines line mountain ridges, solar arrays shimmer in the desert, and oil refineries look like far off cities from the highway at night. Even more technology is required to provide convenient and constant access to this electricity. Switches, outlets, batteries, and gas pumps are our routine points of connection to the powered world. These are not the only ways to use energy though.

Energy is everywhere, we just forget about it because we have grown accustomed to electricity creating fast and big results. Ambient light, heat, and moisture are present in varying quantities in every environment. All of these elements have the capacity to store and release energy and they do so naturally as ambient conditions fluctuate. Using materials that are sensitive to these fluctuations makes it possible to capture and use this energy. The amount of ambient energy situated in any given environment is not enough to power any of our modern devices. However it is a valuable exercise to think about the ways we can adapt our materials and ourselves to the energy that is freely available to us.

Paper + Water is an ongoing series of small projects that explore ways ambient energy to actuate objects without the use of electricity. The method for doing this starts with a hydrophilic surface (cotton paper) which is treated on one side with hydrophobic materials (waxes) to create a bilayer. When the bilayer is exposed to moisture it physically transforms. The shape it takes depends on the grain of the paper and how it was folded. Transformations documented with time-lapse photography can be used as animated sequences in games or other interactive pieces.