Seed of Life

Off, it is a white square. Lit in clusters, you see fragments of a pattern. The full Seed of Life only appears when every pixel is on. I built it as a proof of concept, to find out whether a subdivided matrix behind a printed face would actually read.

I printed it face down so the front came out clean, with a one-millimeter face thin enough to pass light and thick enough to hide the black walls behind it. At a ten-millimeter throw there was no need to bounce anything. What I did not account for was heat. I ran the early tests at full brightness inside a sealed enclosure, and over time the corners curled, the internal grid softened enough to move by hand, and the whole unit bowed away from the wall.

It survived, and it taught me the two things every one of these panels now has: vents in the back, and a current limit in the firmware. It hung at Glow Lounge for several months next to Negative "X".