From Vienna with LED Love

I would like to welcome our next guest blogger, Johannes Grenzfurthner of Vienna, Austria, founder of monochrom, talking about the “LED Matrix”. – Scott

My name is Johannes, and I’m writer, artist and founding member of Vienna/Austria based art-tech-philosophy group monochrom. I was quite flattered when Scott asked me if I would be interested to guestblog for Laughing Squid. And what would a first post be without a special message to the host organism?

Here it is:

I took this picture at the Viennese hacklab Metalab. It’s a very special open space for free exchange of information, and collaboration between technical-creative enthusiasts, hackers and founders. The Lab is dedicated to providing infrastructure for projects and offers a physical space for interested people from the wide fields of IT, new media, and hacker culture.

One of these projects is a mesmerizing piece called “LED Matrix”. Some great humanoids handcrafted it in over a year’s work. And I’m quite impressed they still can look at a soldering iron without falling in a sinister Lovecraftian madness.

The LED Matrix has a resolution of 72×48 (=3456 octets of pixel data followed by a terminating 0x80 octet). Each pixel data octet represents one pixel’s brightness, ranging from 0 (0x00, off) to 15 (0x0F, brightest).

Now they want to create a database of images and short films. So, please help them!

You can find construction details and some images and video examples on their project page.

image via monochrom