Art Gallery

SeeMore is a kinetic sculpture that showcases the inherent beauty of parallel algorithms through the correlating movements of an animatronic 256-node Raspberry Pi computer cluster.

SeeMore is the collaborative brainchild of an artist and a computer scientist, both driven to educate viewers as to the importance of parallel computational thinking. Inspired by the wildly successful Raspberry Pi (RPi)—a small, fully functional computer designed at the extremely low cost of 35 USD, RPis are cheap enough for a young person to reasonably obtain and, more importantly, to tinker with. A single RPi might be very useful to an individual—the world runs on parallel systems without which Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon could not provide their services; local and global weather forecasting would be less accurate; air travel would be less reliable; and essential medicines might go undiscovered.

The resulting work showcases the elegance and significance of parallel computation to viewers while simultaneously educating and inspiring parallel computational thinking. This project translates data movement through a living sculpture that physically represents computation as it propagates and evolves across the surface of the form.