Eleven years in, we're still a studio-first practice — every installation gets prototyped at full scale in our own bay before it ships anywhere.
Refract started in a converted warehouse bay in downtown Los Angeles in 2013, and we're still there — a studio-first practice built around the idea that an installation should be tested at the scale it will actually run at, not approved from a render on a laptop screen.
Fourteen people now: engineers who also write GLSL, fabricators who also debug Arduino code, and a technical director who insists on knowing exactly which GPU a piece will run on before a single shader gets written.
Started Refract in 2013 after five years building real-time visuals for concert tours. Still writes shader code on every project.
Leads the rendering pipeline across every installation — the person who decides what runs on-device versus what gets pre-baked.
Runs the studio bay where every piece gets prototyped at full scale before a client ever sees it.
Builds the audio engines behind every sound-reactive piece, from field recordings to live oscillator banks.
Refract is a fictional studio built for this website demonstration; the names above are illustrative.
1180 Traction Ave, Los Angeles, CA — studio visits by appointment.