01
Environmentthe light, the weather
What grows on the walls, where the sun hits, the reeds by the river. A place is shaped by what surrounds it.
SLATE → photo walks on site, in the place's own light.
New ✺ just launched
Relief art in black slate
Made from one place
What makes
a space
a place?
SLATE gathers what makes one specific place itself: its textures, spaces, history and the people who live it. Then it blends them into a new synthetic material, and makes it physical in black slate. A digital system does the slow work, an artist plays the blend by hand.
Join the waiting list →
making synthetic materials, physical
messy encouraged · drag the bits around
no two slabs alike
from €100
01 The question
A space is anywhere.
A space is anywhere.
A place is here.
Five things turn a space into a place. SLATE collects all five, on site, before anything gets carved.
02
Lived experiencewho wears it down
“the step everybody sits on”
“the wall we leaned on as kids”
People wear places in. A worn step is a record nobody wrote down.
SLATE → we walk with people who know the place. Their names go on the record.
03
Materialwhat it's made of
Façade stone, cobbles, hydraulic floor tiles, bark. Ingredients for the blend, not a "stone-look" print.
SLATE → machine vision turns each texture into depth, ready to mix. Geometry comes from depth, never from colour.
04
Contextwhat it was before
Who built it, what it was before, the company's first workshop, the street it grew from.
SLATE → place research with you, before the walk. It decides what goes into the blend.
05
Localityan attitude, not a look
“from somewhere,
on purpose”
A piece from a Barcelona courtyard can look great in Bangkok. What's silly is the flattened, generic style that globalisation and gentrification sell as a commodity, the same everywhere. Locality is intention: choosing to come from somewhere.
SLATE → every slab keeps where, when and who. Cut in a workshop near the site.
environment + people + material + context + here = a new material
02 What we're fighting
The average of everywhere.
Generative models return the statistical middle of everything they've seen. Most of the built world is now designed from digital sources, so it fills up with material that doesn't come from anywhere.
Generic, beige, smooth, stock, stone-look, averaged, could-be-anywhere.
That's the wall of most new cafés, hotels and offices: one flattened style from Barcelona to Berlin to Bangkok, sold as a commodity.
Going from
- catalogue decor
- AI averages
- stone-look prints
- the artist commission you can't afford
To
- your textures
- your history
- your place, blended into something new
- one artist, a fast system, a fixed price per slab
Reading list: Welcome to AirSpace (Kyle Chayka) · Place and Placelessness (Edward Relph) · non-places (Marc Augé) · and my own VR TERROIR, on materials that carry their place.
03 How a place becomes a material
Collect, blend, make it physical.
Concepts, textures, spaces and history go in. A synthetic material that only this place could produce comes out, carved in slate. The system does the repetitive work, the artist makes the decisions. Pink panels are hands, paper panels are machines.
- 1ArtistCollectresearch + photo walks: textures, spaces, history, stories, with its people
- 2SystemDeptheach texture → 16-bit height map (Depth Anything, Apple Depth Pro)
- 3SystemBlendtextures + 22 generators / 12 blend modes / symmetries → a new material
- 4ArtistPlayby hand on a MIDI controller, live. You can join.
- 5SystemFilesone file per slab, every slab different
- 6SystemEngraveMOPA laser ≤ 1 mm / CNC for deep relief
- 7ArtistReturnback to the place, with its record
04 Formats
One slab to a whole wall.
Estimates, from €100 to €50,000. Every slab gets its own file, so the 1st and the 100th cost the same to make (≈ €40 production per slab). The rest is research, the blend and the artist.
Piece
1 slab · 30 × 30 cm · framed
from €100
start here
Panel
12 slabs · 1.2 × 0.9 m
≈ €1,000
Installation
13–40 slabs · ≈ 1–3.5 m²
≈ €1,000 / m²
Wall
40+ slabs · tiled, no size limit
from €5,000
| Material | Natural black slate, 300 × 300 mm tiles, no ink. Today from the Catalan Pyrenees; for your project, sourced near your place when it makes sense. |
|---|---|
| Relief | MOPA laser: fine relief up to 1 mm, pieces up to ≈ 1 m. CNC: deep relief of several cm, single pieces up to ≈ 2 × 3 m on a large-format machine. Bigger walls are tiled. |
| Files | 16-bit height map per slab, 65,536 depth levels |
| Made | SLATE is the software layer; production runs on a network of workshops. Today Carboxtrem, Barcelona; tomorrow one near your site. |
| So far | 8 test slabs (5 PLA, 3 slate), more in production |
05 Who it's for
Places that want to look like themselves.
visualisationHotels & restaurants
A reception piece guests photograph, made from the building or the region.
visualisationOffices
The company's own story in stone: the first workshop, the home city.
visualisationMuseums & public buildings
A neighbourhood's textures and history, blended with its people.
visualisationPrivate clients
A home, a street, a city that matters to you.
Architects and interior designers: we work as your fabrication-and-art partner, from brief to installation.
06 Questions
Before you ask.
Is it made by AI?
Partly. Machine vision reads depth from your photos. Everything else is decided by an artist, live. The relief itself: no prompts, no generated images. If it sounds like a position against the average, it is.
Do I need to send photos?
No. We do a photo walk on site with you. Your own photos can be added.
Can I take part?
Yes. You can join the session and play the relief with us.
What if a slab breaks?
We keep the recipe. The same slab can be made again.
How long does it take?
Days, if you make it yourself in the web app: upload, blend, order. A bit longer with an artist in the loop. Months for a custom commission, from place research to installation.
Does it work for acoustics?
Not yet. Laser relief (≤ 1 mm) does nothing to sound. Deep CNC relief (3–10 cm) can scatter echoes. The acoustic prototype is next, to be tested in a lab. Untested for now.
07 Who's behind it
Bernat Cuní, artist in the loop.
Designer and artist, founder of cunicode, Barcelona. 15 years on synthetic materials, machine learning and digital fabrication.
- 2025S+T+ARTS EC(H)O residency, VR TERROIR
- 2020RunwayML residency, Deep Textures
- 2014London Science Museum, permanent collection
Now
First pilot installations. Production with Carboxtrem, Barcelona.
Next
A web app: your photos, a slab at home. And a licence for designers.
Research
cunicode.com/works/slate
Bernat, layered into a street
Waiting list · first pilots
Get on the list.
SLATE opens to a small number of places first. 10 pilot spots open in January 2027. Join the waiting list and tell us which place you'd turn into a material.