A digital art installation where glitch art and graffiti merge.

Today, Fraqture has grown into an interactive platform that can be adapted to almost any context. During the day, Fraqture uses several algorithms to turn a curated pool of images into glitch art; twisting them, shuffling their pixels and repainting them in an infinite combination of ways. In addition to the curated images, passersby could become a part of the piece by using a forward facing camera to take a picture that glitches into a totally original piece of art and then vanishes for good. At night, when fewer people are passing by, it generates art that doesn't require any images at all by manipulating geometric shapes and even playing classic arcade games by itself.

IoT, Hardware Prototyping, Open Source, Arduino, Hardware Design & Development, Physical Installations, Environmental Design

The core of Fraqture is a set of algorithms that we developed that animate the canvas by manipulating images and text. We also developed interfaces to third-party software so that we could source media from Twitter and a forward-facing webcam.

We wanted Fraqture’s canvas to be more than just a screen. We decided to break out into the physical realm by building our own custom LED controller. The panels hold 270 LEDs each and were built in-house. In order to talk to our custom controller, we wrote custom firmware that would receive commands from the main application and paint the LEDs.