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LED Carpet


Interactive electric tapestry inviting
visitors to explore carpet patterns






Led Carpet is an interactive artwork developed for We Make Carpets which allows visitors to use the artwork as a canvas to create their own unique designs which adhere to the principles of patterns and symmetry. As with all other work of We Make Carpets, Led Carpet purposefully exposes its materiality. It consists of 12.000 LEDs and was hand-built.

We Make Carpets is a collective of artists who transform everyday objects and materials into site-specific installations with a focus on patterns and symmetry. For an upcoming overview exhibition of their work at MU Art House they wanted to develop a unique electronic artwork retaining the values driving their practice.

Client
We Make Carpets, via MU

Collaborators
Peter De Man (pcb design)
My role
Technical lead, electronics R&D, programming

Technologies used
  • Arduino - custom bit-banging approach for highest refresh rates of the display
  • Local embedded Linux server (Bash)
  • NodeJS - HTML5/CSS, Javascript for iPad frontend



This project was a wonderful labour of love. It had to be produced in limited time and the process was one of constant forward falling. The making process of a We Make Carpets work is typically a painstaking one filled with mind-numbing repetition. In line with this it was fitting for them to produce the carpet itself. They had almost no prior experience with soldering but were taught how to solder and how to produce a matrix of LEDs.

From the start my goal was to make the matrix refresh as fast as possible. I wanted to prevent moiré patterns on video recordings. I developed a custom efficient bit-banging approach for this. After protoyping which electronic circuits could support the fastest approach I approached Peter De Man to design the pcb. He was fantastic in finalising the requirements and produced a modular design for us in record time.

Getting this project to work was a feverish process of constant work and it was immensely satisfying when it all came together. For the visitors there’s something magical about drawing on a tablet - a familiar activity - and seeing this materialise on the Led Carpet in real-time. This directness fosters a playful dialog between the user and the emerging patterns, prompting an iterative process of discovery.