Another Paradise Lost
Digital Artwork consisting of 48 small LED screens displaying the first three lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost – one letter per screen. The screens are mounted in transparent laser cut acrylic frames
The randomised/staggered programming of the text by Dr Richard Christian and Allan Parker allows the text to disassemble and reform the famous lines. The work highlights the complex relationships between culture,. memory, ownership and technology.
Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe
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
The simulation above shows the first thirty screens.