Remembering.LILO Gives the Utah Teapot Its Designer Back
Valerio Arsenio's Eindhoven graduation project feeds Lieselotte Kantner's life story into computer graphics' most famous test model, then 3D prints the results.
- When
- Through Sun., Oct. 25, 2026, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.
- Where
- Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show, Station F5, Eindhoven, Netherlands, during Dutch Design Week.
- Admission
- A Dutch Design Week ticket is required.
Remembering.LILO is a row of white 3D-printed teapots that have been twisted, split and pulled into shapes no teapot should hold. Valerio Arsenio made them for a Design Academy Eindhoven thesis with a program that takes archival records, biographical material and what the designer calls "digital traces" of Lieselotte "Lilo" Kantner and turns them into parameters that "modify and corrupt" a single 3D model. Each print is one step further from the original.
The model is the Utah teapot. Martin Newell digitized an ordinary Melitta teapot at the University of Utah in 1975, and it became computer graphics' default test object: rendering papers showed it off for decades, and early graphics libraries could draw one with a single function call. Game engines inherited that whole pipeline. Kantner designed the ceramic original for Melitta and was left out of the story entirely. Arsenio's program puts her back into the geometry, so the teapot becomes, in the project's own words, "a carrier of memory and evidence of authorship."
The series is one of more than 200 bachelor's and master's projects in the Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show at Dutch Design Week. Arsenio came through the school's Studio Technogeographies, led by Martina Muzi, who is also the show's art director this year. Lev Manovich singled out the piece after a walk through the galleries, with pictures of the prints beside an image of the original model. Arsenio also showed in Raise Your Voice at the Van Abbehuis earlier this year, after a 2025 residency at Baltan Laboratories.
Three teapots from Remembering.LILO, each generated from records of Lieselotte Kantner. Photos courtesy Valerio Arsenio.
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