Anatomy as circuit
Fossil Synths is a family of playable art objects: real, manufacturable printed circuit boards whose copper is drawn as fossil anatomy. The trace routing follows the logic of the organism — chambers, segments, ribs — so that the electrical function and the fossil form are one and the same drawing.
The choice of fossils is the concept, not a style. A fossil is time made mineral: life that endured for hundreds of millions of years and survives only as an imprint in stone. Redrawing these creatures as state-of-the-art electronics makes the prehistoric futuristic — and turns the same gaze back on us. Every device we manufacture today is a fossil in waiting: our circuit boards will one day be read in the strata as the index fossils of the digital age, ruins of a civilisation that measured itself in gigahertz. Fossil Synths plays with that double time — instruments that sound in the present, drawn as what they will inevitably become.
Each board is a self-contained electronic instrument. Exposed gold copper (ENIG) on matte black solder mask makes the circuit legible as engraving: the component becomes ornament, the ornament is functional, and every creature is a production-ready file, not a rendering. The series also carries an inversion — creatures that geology compressed into fossil fuel return here as instruments, and, in the closing proposal, as candidates to draw part of their life from ambient light instead of burning anything.
Two creatures, one language
Ammonode
A harmonic touch synthesizer. Eighteen chambers of the shell are touch electrodes — each fires a note, and sequences climb the spiral as arpeggios of sound and light. Cymatics and a Schumann coil.
Trilobeat
A step sequencer / groovebox. The twenty segments of the exoskeleton are touch-sensitive steps; patterns run down the animal's back as light, with an OLED and encoders in the cephalon.
Both instruments share a design language — gold on black, anatomy as routing, touch as the primary interface — and are conceived for exhibition, live performance and limited production.