And the fact that each component is hand-made by the artist means that no component is ever exactly the same.

Each one is numbered and signed by the artist. Each Nixie Machine requires months of intensive, fully-focused work meaning Buchwald is realistically only able to make about six Nixie Machines per year. “Metal is the perfect material to work with creatively”īuchwald meticulously hand-polishes each brass component and, for the blackened steel parts, burnishes them by repeatedly heating and dipping them into acid to achieve a silky, black oxidation – all of this with his bare hands. Working with materials like steel excites me, which probably seems a little archaic in this digital age.” “You can use a variety of techniques for working with metal. “Metal is the perfect material to work with creatively,” he says. Once the prototype was perfected, Buchwald started work on the limited-edition production pieces.Įach Machine features no fewer than 350 components, each one painstakingly hand-crafted by Buchwald himself out of bars and blocks of raw metal. I’m a little bit obsessed like that, maybe a little crazy.”Ī more detailed planning phase followed, before he set about constructing a prototype Nixie Machine that, from design through to completion, took almost a whole year. “If I don’t manage to make something of the ideas in my mind then I have a feeling of dissatisfaction. “I am passionate about sketching and drawing because they allow me to bring my visions to life, they help me find the essence of a new object,” he says. The artist started, as he always does, by making a sketch of the structure on paper with pen and marker – Buchwald eschews modern computer design programs. For me, the six Nixie tubes needed to take centre stage.”

I wanted Nixie Machine’s main structure – the four flared legs and three arms in the centre – to confidently carry the time, yet not distract the viewer from it. He says: “I am fascinated by the uncompromising functionality of machines and their strictly form-follows-function design. Buchwald has created Nixie Machine using the same idiosyncratic style of design and engineering as the Machine Lights, but this time his starting point was spectacular Nixie tubes made in East Germany at the height of the Cold War. A decade ago, in his Berlin atelier, he started to focus on making his acclaimed Machine Lights series – imposing hand-crafted sculptural lighting objects featuring blackened steel, brushed brass and visible light filaments emitting a warm, yellow glow.

What is a nixie tube