The Flip-Dot project was developed as part of a series of art installations on a cruise ship. By the time I was brought into the project, the main concept had already been developed: Flip Dots along the entire wall will animate various scenes recorded underwater, such as diving or marine life, and various poetry would appear as well.

   I worked on detailing the installation onto existing cruise ship drawings. The mounting method changed several times, before ending up with aluminum “U” Channels (Later inspiring my Rapid Labs project). I also helped select and edit the font used for the poetry, since it is tricky to display characters in an aesthetic way when they are all pixelated.

   All 100 flip-dot panels and 21 U Channels arrived at our studio one morning, and we proceeded to assemble everything onto the wall the following weeks to work out the kinks. It was only by putting it together that were able to anticipate problems that are likely to happen once we hand it over to the contractor, the most  important of which involves the messy cables crushing the control board. I managed to come up with a solution involving two conduits and some packing tape. We also realized the fragility of the flip-dots, since a lot  of the dots became bent in during the installation process.

   After prototyping this, the installation was such a success on the ship that we were asked to come up with more ideas for future cruise ships. The many versions that we came up are much more ambitious, and are currently being reviewed.