Flutter is an interactive artwork by Dominic Harris, and produced by Cinimod Studio. Presented at this years Kinetica Art Fair, the installation explores the viewer’s encounter with a rabble of virtual butterflies.  Inspired by some ideas from the zoetrope and its later successor, the praxinoscope, by introducing interactive component it attempts to distance itself from the linear nature of the historical devices. As the viewer moves along the piece, the butterflies respond in various manners, directly interacting with the viewer. The object is 4.5m long, consisting of 88 monitors mounted as double-sided video fins protruding from a front surface mirror.

I asked Dominic about the technical component of the installation and how it was all achieved. Dominic writes:

All hardware and control is bespoke, developed for the Flutter artwork.  Each of the 88 screens is individually controlled from a PCB that holds 1 gigabyte of uncompressed full-resolution AVI animation.  Each of these is connected in series to a DMX data signal, where the DMX provides the frame number of the animation file to display update at 60 fps.   A single solid state computer runs the overall installation, taking the data feed from the two thermal tracking cameras and interpreting their outputs to determine the correct animation frame number for each screen.

To get more information on the project, see this project page on Cinimod Studio’s website. A new edition of Flutter is currently being prepared and will be launched as a limited edition later this year.

Dominic Harris is an interactive artist whose chosen palette of materials include lighting, interaction design, and electronics. Dominic’s artworks exhibit an on-going fascination between the marriage of evocative and beautiful concepts with the inventive adaptation of cutting-edge technologies. Dominic designs and fabricates his artworks at Cinimod Studio, a multi-disciplinary practice he founded in 2007.