An internet-free e-ink picture frame that displays a never ending stream of stylised flower images. Powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, it uses a local stable diffusion model prompted with random flower and curated styles that work particularly well on 7-colour e-ink display, i.e. low-colour palette styles and simple designs.
AI-assisted collage creation, generating images autonomously 24/7 on dedicated low-cost single-board computers. Continuous emergence of painterly forms engineered for zero-maintenance long-term gallery display (visplastica.com).
Under the hood, Vis Plastica is powered by CLIP-CLOP & Arnheim 1–3: evolutionary neural collage algorithms developed with vision-language models (CLIP) acting as an aesthetic critic to guide stochastic grammar patch placement and generative procedural brushstrokes without direct pixel rendering, published at the International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC).
Lo-fi artificial-life simulations and cellular automata designed specifically to run on low-end Raspberry Pi hardware, generating continually evolving emergent visual patterns and micro-biochemistries in real time.
Multimodal foundation models (Gemini) acting as an aesthetic critic steering 3D evolutionary generative art across 200 generations using pairwise binary tournaments. Exhibited at OXO Tower Wharf London (27,000+ visitors) and featured in The New York Times. Includes 13 complete 200-generation evolutionary runs.
Permanent architectural art installation in King's Cross London (with Jason Bruges Studio). 2,940 suspended cast-acrylic cubes containing 635,040 individually controllable LEDs. An autonomous agent, with internal homeostatic drives, to curate 60+ 3D cellular automata and AI simulations responding in real time to pedestrian cameras.
Handcrafted modular synthesizer housed in an authentic wooden wine crate with custom birch cheeks and aluminum/FR4 faceplates. Includes custom stripboard modules: 100-DSP Stereo Reverb (FV-1 DSP chip with 7-segment program selector), Triple 3340 VCOs using ElectroSmith submodules, and NiftyNoise generator.
Hand-annotated iPad patch logs documenting generative cable routing, oscillator cross-modulation, clock divisions, and DSP settings across sessions: 1 Fish per Second, System Out, Christmas Out of Sync, Leaving the Heliopause, Spiritual Guidance, Spectral Gerbil, You Kill Me, Insanitiser Patching, UnHandeled Susanne, and Lemon Jam.
Interactive browser simulator modeling the electro-mechanical sound-bar resonance and pickup physics of the rare KORG Phase 8 acoustic instrument, built with Web Audio physical-modeling resonators.
"The body is not a given: Joint Agent Policy Learning and Morphology Evolution" (ACM / GECCO 2019). Research at Google DeepMind demonstrating continuous co-adaptation where both physical 3D body morphologies (limb dimensions, joint actuators, mass distributions) and deep reinforcement learning neural policies are simultaneously evolved in MuJoCo physics sumo wrestling. (Note: this is not the physical EvoBorg robot, but virtual morphology co-adaptation).
Technical & Creative Product Lead across four broadcast series of the BAFTA-nominated BBC children's TV show. Hundreds of thousands of children engineered physics-based virtual creatures using the downloadable 3D Zook Kit (rigid bodies, joints, and Inverse Kinematics), with winning designs summoned onto a physical BBC studio table via real-time mixed-reality broadcast camera tracking.
Senior Researcher and Head of Artificial Life at CyberLife Technology / Creature Labs, involved from Creatures 1 (C1, 1997) through Creatures 2, Creatures 3, and Docking Station. Designed heterogeneous multi-lobe neural networks, 256-chemical endocrine/receptor biochemistry cascades, and mutable haploid digital chromosomes that gave autonomous virtual organisms ("Norns") genuine drives, hunger, pain, learning, and reproduction.
Foundational research into how autonomous agents develop communication and self-improving capabilities: Wanting to be Understood: How External Representations Shape Communication (investigating shared representations in multi-agent coordination), Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement via Prompt Evolution (using evolutionary search over mutation operators), and PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks.
Landmark environmental art collaboration with artist Bettina Furnée on the eroding cliffs of Dunwich, Suffolk. 38 appliquéd letter flags placed across the shoreline with automated camera systems capturing sunrise-to-sunset time-lapses across an entire solar year, documenting natural coastal erosion and decay.
Collaborative public art installations with Bettina Furnée: POWERHOUSE (large-scale multi-authored typographic word projection staged on the Cambridge University Library tower during Easter Term 2008), and Reality Rules (Augmented Reality on Parker's Piece overlaying public rules for a fair society on visitors' view of the green).
Pioneering mobile Augmented Reality game where players commanded 3D pirate galleons battling in the real-world. Check out our high-budget homemade promo video! The game used cutting-edge computer vision and planar optical marker tracking running in real time on Symbian S60 smartphones (Nokia N95, N82) years before modern AR platforms existed. Unfortunately, we backed the wrong horse with Nokia!
Technical Director at Optricks on mobile Augmented Reality. Fun projects and interesting partners, producing commercial installations and interactive experiences for the BBC (iPlayer AR), Disney Pixar (Buzz Lightyear Blast Off & Cinema Photobooth), Carlsberg (Can Catch), Merkur (Oceans AR Album), and mobile 3D physics on Nokia handsets.
Holiday collaboration bringing together Vis Plastica's unique autonomous artwork to Xmas Vibe to help child war victims this season. Features circular organic cotton garments pressed with Christmas editions (The Twelve Days of Christmas and 24 Advent Days) synthesized via CLIPDraw vector stroke optimization (arXiv:2106.14843).
100% of net profits are remitted directly from the Isle of Wight solar factory to War Child UK (Reg. Charity #1072216) to provide emergency trauma care, clean water, and safe spaces for children surviving armed conflict.
Instant reviews on instant noodles, the instant they are consumed.
Breakthrough optical AI system fusing natural ice crystal structures with advanced photonics (ultracoolai.com). Uses four orthogonal properties of light (intensity, color, polarization, phase) projected onto custom-grown 3D ice crystal lattices, harnessing refraction, scatter, and natural birefringence to perform parallel neural computation at the speed of light with sustainable, zero-waste cooling.
Experimental audio laboratory and audio tool suite exploring frequency decoupling, generative soundscapes, and procedural sound synthesis.
Modifying a £15 CCTV security camera C-mount lens with a hand hacksaw, sandpaper, and epoxy to mount onto a Panasonic Lumix GF1, producing unmistakable creamy swirly bokeh and extreme shallow depth of field.
Reversing a standard 58mm prime lens with homemade extension tubes to achieve 4:1 super-macro magnification, capturing compound fly eyes, worker ants, and poppy seeds. Paired with a zero-glass drilled pinhole body cap for dreamlike infinite depth of field.
Playing 7-inch vinyl records with zero electricity by using the precision fluid-bearing spindle of a dead 3.5-inch computer hard drive as a turntable platter, amplified acoustically via a sewing needle pushed through a rolled A4 paper cone.
Veroboard stripboard track layout adapting Jay Silver's 555-timer synthesizer into a compact pencil clip, turning graphite sketches and skin contact into frequency-modulated musical instruments.
Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) firmware experiments unlocking RAW, HDR, and custom uBASIC scripting on compact Canon cameras. Includes pre-drone kite aerial photography (KAP) and a time-lapse video of a homebrew bottle barometer and passing weather clouds.
Modding webcam CCD sensors into 1.25-inch microscope and telescope barrel eyepieces. Capturing mineral crystal birefringence under cross-polarised light, and long-exposure astrophotography of the Orion Nebula and Pleiades cluster.
Simple tiny robots made from toothbrush heads, pager vibration motors, and coin cells that buzz around at high speed using kinetic locomotion. Dylan's homemade build filmed buzzing on the tabletop.
A treasure trove of early laboratory notes, tutorials, and maker experiments preserved from the earlier Concrete5 era of 2ne1.com. Covers lens modifications, CHDK scripts, balloon aerial photography, and early electronics builds.