Sidewalk Hustle

This is really incred­i­ble!  My Buddy linked me this video, and after watch­ing it I have to say I am thor­oughly impressed.  Scot­tish elec­tronic musi­cian Calvin Har­ris got a bunch of half naked women, painted them with ink and had them per­form his new sin­gle “Ready For The Week­end.” It may sound a lit­tle strange but after watch­ing the video I believe the cor­rect word is awe­some!  Basi­cally what hap­pened was 15 bikini clad mod­els painted with Bare Con­duc­tive, a new skin safe ink which con­ducts elec­tric­ity safely across the body and when the per­form­ers touch the con­nec­tion com­pletes a cir­cuit, trig­ger­ing a sound.

The unique instru­ment setup con­sists of 34 pads on the floor which have also been painted with the con­duc­tive ink and con­nected to a com­puter.  The project is the result of a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Calvin Har­ris and mas­ters stu­dents from the Royal Col­lege of Art’s Indus­trial Design Engi­neer­ing pro­gram. Bare Con­duc­tive was devel­oped by RCA stu­dents Bibi Nel­son, Becky Pilditch, Isabel Lizardi and Matt John­son. The cus­tom elec­tron­ics and soft­ware for the project were cre­ated by Matt John­son, employ­ing two Arduinos and the graph­i­cal audio pro­gram­ming tool Max MSP. The per­form­ers, floor pads, Arduinos and Max MSP com­bine to cre­ate a giant MIDI con­troller which is used to cre­ate music which is sequenced and quan­tized with Able­ton Live.

COOL!