Milk Pixel in Realtime magazine

Milk Pixel has been featured in issue #95 of the Australian contemporary arts magazine Real Time. The article 'Coders, Crafters and Crooks' is a report on the Craftivism and Uncraftivism events at the Arnolfini (many videos of which are now available on the uncraftivism wiki). Here's what it says about us:

"Flickering from across the room was Milk Pixel built by the Bristol Robotics Lab, an inspired re-use project incorporating LEDs into two-litre plastic milk bottles. The 64 bottle/pixel array continuously responded to sound performances and moving image in unexpected collaborations and improvisations."

Interestingly the picture chosen to head the article (shown above) was one I took of Jason and Paul (from Potential Indifference) debugging MilkPixel a day or so before the event. It's nice to think that the editors thought that the hands-on sorting of a tanlge of ribbon cable and recycled junk represented the craftivism movement to such a degree.

The Article was written by Melinda Rackham, an Emerging Artforms Curator and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University.

Just for the record, MilkPixel no longer flickers, we fixed that bug :-)

Milk Pixel at the Arnolfini

After a week of stress and late nights, Milk Pixel was up and running in the Arnolfini during Saturday and Sunday's uncurated open event unCraftivism. We kept the project more or less under wraps until the day so reactions were very interesting. Here are some pictures:

Milk Pixel is essentially a giant, interactive, 8x8 Red Green Blue LED array with each led pixel placed inside a plastic milk bottle. The textured plastic of the bottles diffuses the lights from the leds nicely to give some interesting colour combination.

The patterns of colours are generated from webcam and microphone input as well as number of manual controls. This means that the system responds to motion and sound. During the weekend the array was feeding off live musicians, projected films, games of tambourelli (badminton with tambourines) and anyone who happened to walk by during quiet moments. The Audio Visual driver software was written entierly in Processing. In the above photo the green parts of the array reflect movments of the brass instrument and player.

Here is the system with myself (center), Paul O'Dowd (left) and Thomas Burton (right). Jason Welsby is another memeber of the team that isn't in the photo.

Oh, and here's a video of it watching a movie while listening to a band. There are still some glitches that need to be ironed out so the representation of the audio / visual input is quite abstract at the moment...

If you were at craftivism and have any pictures of Milk Pixel I'd love to see them, leave a comment below...