Andrew Fentem
Andrew Fentem is an inventor of electronic technologies and systems, working on the boundary between art and technology. He has been building exotic electronic systems since 2001. Some of the products of his work are commercial patentable inventions, while others are intended to be more artistically provocative. Andrew has an unusually broad academic and commercial research background, having worked on the development of everything from military systems to toys, and from electronic dresses to musical instruments. He received an award for his pioneering multitouch-touchscreen research from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA).
'LED Eyes' was initially inspired by recent psychology research that found that merely the image of a pair of eyes on a wall was sufficient to cause people in the vicinity to behave more altruistically. In the first version of the piece, the eyes were programmed to follow objects moving around the room, using data the from an object-tracking camera, but it was found that the piece seemed more intriguing and alive when it's behaviour was more autonomous and slightly random, taking only occasional cues from the camera and stereo microphones. This is how the piece presented here is programmed to operate.