This article was taken from the October 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Taiwanese artist Shih Chieh Huang makes glowing robot sea creatures from everyday objects.

The result: surreal sculptures that shimmer and pulse like jellyfish. To create each piece, Huang, 39, collects items, from discarded furniture to plastic bags and cheap sensors, in his Brooklyn studio. "I've always worked with household objects," says Huang, a TED Fellow. "My favourite thing is going to 99-cent stores [around the world]. The things you find are always different." Computer cooling fans combined with plastic bags become billowing tentacles; Tupperware is transformed into an exoskeleton; highlighter ink dissolved in water becomes luminous body fluid. To make his creations react, Huang hacks together garage-door sensors, guitar tuners and light sensors, all connected to a basic microcontroller.

Trained at New York's School of Visual Arts, Huang credits his talent for electronics to the skills he learnt as a child in Taiwan. "When I first moved to the US, I was making a lot of extra-credit projects for school because my English wasn't very good," he recalls. "For science class, I would take apart a remote-controlled car and try to build an [animated] molecule using the motors." Interested in bioluminescent wildlife, he completed a fellowship at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington to study deep-sea creatures; the resulting work was displayed at TED2014 in Vancouver.

He is now finalising a new series of works to debut early next year, including his first foray into wearable sculptures. "All of the objects I use could do more than they are made to," says Huang. "Everything has more than one function. I want people to keep their imaginations open."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK