Artemide’s Free Pixel by Carlo Ratti brings us towards the “liberation” of the light. Extremely small, powerful and independent, LEDs can become pixels, elements of a mutant picture of light, giving us the freedom to manipulate the light in a space at unprecedented, granular level.
“Rather than nodes clinging a rigid infrastructure, LEDs can act as their own dynamic and living ecosystem, independent and mobile. As these technologies become ubiquitous, we are witnessing the dawn of the Free Pixel”.
Far beyond the familiar on\off incandescents, Carlo Ratti’s Free Pixel can be delicately controlled by digital system, modulating intensity, position and color. Old discontinuities are replaced by infinite gradients in space and time, a dynamic cloud of light.
The installation at the Artemide showroom on the occasion of Euroluce 2015, consists in a robotic arm that continually composes a stream of contents by physically positioning 1000 pixels on a panel that assumes constantly changing luminous configurations. The magnetic pixel developed for the purpose by Artemide is a high-efficiency LED that lights up as soon as it is placed on the PCP panel, made up of conductors covered with graphite.
Free pixel, one of the most interesting light experiment of the Milano Design Week 2015, will be exposed till the 9th May.
Text by Gabriele Masi.
