Paradise Lost
46 small LED screens display the first three lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost – one letter per screen.
The randomised/staggered programming of the text by Dr Richard Christian and Allan Parker allows the text to disassemble and reform. This work was inspired by a throw away comment from a media journalist that the internet was “‘…just another Paradise Lost”.
Each 1.8″ LCD screen is controlled by a Raspberry Pi microcontoller. The software that enables the Pico to drive the animation was written in C by Dr Richard Christian. Video frames are prepared in PNG format and compiled with a framerate and stagger values by the software into a single binary that is flashed to the microcontroller. The software works within the tight limitations of memory and processor speed of the Pico. A compression algorithm finds the optimum weave of images into blocks for compression. A simulator written in Javascript enables large sets of videos to be tested in parallel for arrays of screens. The code written by Dr. Christian is open source and available on a github repository. https://github.com/rpxpx/picovideo