Making a display from Cocktail Umbrellas

Together with a friend, I did an art project exploring human colour perception, by building a display with huge pixels made from cocktail umbrellas that open and close in a half-tone pattern.

PixSol is an interactive art installation that shows the processes of spatial pixel discretisation and colour discretisation in images at a human-perceivable scale. While mostly unaware of it, we see the continuous colour spectrum represented in separate Red, Green and Blue dots of varying size all around us in electronic monitors and printed images. PixSol makes these pervasive techniques approachable by rendering the visual effect in life-size physical cocktail umbrellas.

To test our ideas we played with many screen sizes and colour settings in a software simulation. We then built a 3x3 black-white display, hacking around at Hackspace London. Unfortunately, we didn't win the funds requested for our brilliant and useful scaled-up version - our 15x15 coloured display - but still had a lot of fun during the process. We documented our experiences at https://pixsol.wikispaces.com/.


Project together with Philo van Kemenade (who did most of the work).


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  • PixSol - Wiki