Project: Ascend, as the sheet prints it, merges a digital design with a physical sculpture. A visitor customizes a mythical statue — hair, eyes, body — names it, watches the result projected in real time, and can hold it after 3D printing. The line that matters for search and for the festival is the last one: featured at Ars Electronica 2025. The festival's own page credits Tony Macpela as interactive artist and names the UNATC MA in Interactive Technologies for Performing and Media Arts. This domain and that page are the same person. The link is on this credit so the two do not drift apart.
The interaction is a sequence of choices that become an object, not a sensor reading a dance. That puts ASCEND closer to Noroc sa ai — an interface with a result — than to Presence Error, which refuses identity down to an outline. Here identity is assembled on purpose: you pick the features, you give the name, you leave with a print. The projection is the live proof that the choice landed. The print is the proof that the digital body was allowed to become matter. The portfolio does not describe the web layout button by button. The Ars text, which this page links, talks about vaporwave, self-image, and the rituals of online identity. Where the sheet is shorter, the sheet still governs what Tony claims on his own site. The festival page is the external record, not a license to add features he did not list.
ASCEND este piesa de pus lângă căutarea Ars Electronica și lângă instalație interactivă. Statuia se compune, se proiectează, se printează. Nu este laser de spectacol și nu este video mapping de fațadă. Creditul de pe site-ul festivalului și creditul de aici trebuie să rămână același nume: Tony Macpela, București.
Producers and curators should send the Ars URL and this URL together. One is the festival's record of 2025. The other is the designer's record, with the stills and the Vimeo he chose to publish. Hiring a sequel means hiring that sequence — choose, name, project, print — not a generic "interactive activation." Say ASCEND in the email so it is not routed as a lighting plot.
Project: Ascend is published as Interactive installation. Merging digital design with physical sculpture. Customize a mythical statue — hair, eyes, body — name it, watch it project in real-time, then hold it in your hands through 3D printing. Featured at Ars Electronica 2025.
Seen beside the rest of the archive, Project: Ascend sits next to Noroc sa ai (Interactive · Video Design), Sonification ROOM (Interactive Installation, Sound Art, Light Art), The Space Between Us (Sensors · Projection · Live Visuals). The point of keeping them on separate URLs is that a search for the piece, and a search for the job, land on a page that names Tony Macpela and the actual credit — Interactive installation — rather than on a single scrolling file the crawler never finished reading.
Hiring the Interactive installation credit on Project: Ascend means hiring Tony Macpela in Bucharest, an actor who also designs laser, video, and interactive systems — not a CNC cutting shop, and not an anonymous rental house. The tools written on the card are Web Interface · 3D Printing. The published description is the brief he is willing to print. Write to maccpela@gmail.com or call +40 720 906 907 and name the credit you need, so the acting conversation and the design conversation stay distinct.