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Armon Naeini Builds Mirrors That Glitch Back

The artist who works as Entroplay treats the camera as a feedback loop, not a sensor — and writes the code that becomes the texture.

5 min read

Most motion-tracking installations treat the camera as an input device. You move, it measures, something responds. Armon Naeini — who works under the name Entroplay — treats it as a mirror held up to another mirror.

He describes the effect as an infinite tunnel, a way of observing himself from one layer higher up. “I’m very aware of being aware,” he told Artifice’s Minsoo Bae in an interview conducted on 17 March 2026. The installations are an attempt to hand that condition to somebody else for a few minutes.

The practice, as he states it

His ITP profile describes a fascination with visual entropy produced from digital experiences, and a practice built on real-time glitching techniques, depth-sensing cameras and experimental technologies. The listed areas are interactive installation, projection and laser mapping, generative art, real-time digital media, AR development and creative coding. The listed tools are C++, GLSL, Processing and JavaScript.

The line that explains the rest is his: “The code, within itself, is the message.”

That is not a general gesture at computational art. In Entrome, the installation he showed at nodes:ii in New York on 11 and 12 April 2026 — presented by Artifice and Onassis ONX — the visual texture on the walls is his own proprietary JavaScript, displayed as the material of the image rather than hidden behind it. The piece is a 270-degree projection across three walls driven by a single camera, with JavaScript and TouchDesigner applications talking to each other. Participants’ movement produces data-moshed, motion-vector-based imagery. The 11 April session was ticketed with talks and performance; 12 April was an open house.

Feedback as the subject

Naeini’s account of what happens in front of the camera is unusually concrete about the loop. A camera pointed at a subject produces a self-induced feedback effect, which he calls “dancing with yourself” — and because the output re-enters the input, it never settles. He calls it a never-ending story.

The body matters here more than the sensor does. He says he often loses touch with his own body, and values how dancers reinterpret his work through their movement. Artifice connects this to Umwelt, the idea that subjective experience is bounded by one’s senses — which is roughly what a depth camera is: a different Umwelt, with different limits, rendered visible.

His process starts physically. He begins by walking and moving, then converts those images into visuals in the studio. He performs martial-arts-based rituals alone with the curtains closed and the electronics off. He starts with hand drawings, because he is also a graffiti artist, and lets that motion set the day’s mood. Motion is the central theme, by his own account.

Glitch as a discipline, not an effect

The glitch in his work is load-bearing rather than decorative. He credits glitch art with loosening his perfectionism, which he links to his OCD, and he describes valuing imperfection and uncertainty — “the juiciness of reality.” What he is after is a balance between structure and chaos; the name Entroplay points at play, failure and generative energy at once.

He also has a working definition of magic that doubles as a description of his method: “Magic is like you take structure, you take governance, you take boundaries and you break them.” He was given a laptop at three by software-engineer parents and has described technology as an escape since childhood. Editing his own image with code, he says, makes him feel more than he is.

The works, dated

  • Resonance, Self — audio-visual installation, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, April 2023. The video above is his own documentation.
  • ID Part 1 — 2025. Shown in the Dancing the Algorithm exhibition at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival; the festival’s catalogue lists its materials as TouchDesigner, Kinect Azure, GLSL and Python.
  • ID Pt. III — motion-tracking installation at the Digital Arts Space, The Music Center, downtown Los Angeles, 20 February – 19 April 2026. Visitors stepped in front of a motion-tracking camera and saw their movement rendered on screens as colour, line and movement. Free, with RSVP.
  • Entrome — 11–12 April 2026, nodes:ii, New York.

His exhibition history also includes Meow Wolf Denver and the Times Square billboards.

Where he sits professionally

SVA lists him under BFA Design, with his roles given as design lead at Baton and installation designer and developer at Meow Wolf. He is also listed as a postdoctoral research resident at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, holds an MPS from NYU, and lists Newlab, Verci and NYU among current and former clients. He is based in Brooklyn, and is described by The Music Center’s press coverage as an Iranian multimedia artist; his LinkedIn describes him as Iranian-American.

A note on sourcing: his portfolio at entroplay.world is a client-rendered site that serves no readable text to a fetcher, and his ITP profile links only to Instagram. Everything dated above comes from a venue, a festival catalogue, an institutional profile or the Artifice interview rather than from the portfolio.

Sources

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