Role: Pitching, production & client management, part development, part design, part installation
Overview
For Sunderland City Council (UK), we delivered Pixel Plaza as a landmark permanent LED installation designed as a public space for gathering, play and interaction. The motivation was to celebrate Sunderland’s transformation from its rich shipbuildig and mining past to a modern and vibrant city connected with a smart city infrastructure. In essence, bring the transformation outside the server rooms and into the streets for people to experience directly.
Located in the city center, the installation is a 360° ring of twelve custom-fabricated, dual-sided LED totems that functions as a piece of “living architecture”—a sculptural system that responds to the rhythms of the city as well as engaging the public through bespoke interactive experiences such as the AI Avatar generator or the realtime collaborative DJ & VJ experience.
Technical Delivery
Scope covered the end-to-end design, manufacturing, delivery, and installation of the complete hardware system. This included 12 metal totems, each featuring two 50cm x 150cm LED displays protected by acrylic sheets. Furthermore, the totems housed surround speakers (6 in total) and 12 people-presence sensors. The entire system is powered by two rendering servers connected via 5G, mmWave and fiber connections to the smart city data infrastructure. The actual totem manufacturing was completed in conjunction with a hardware partner.
The installation allows for a range of interacitivity: on one end is the reactivity to the people’s presence inside the ring while on the other is the rich interaction with the experiences through a web interface (after scanning a simple QR code).
Permanent Content: A Notch + Ableton Procedural Visuals and Music
The installation’s primary mode uses real-time Smart City data—reflecting footfall, traffic, wifi usage, weather, and the sea—to drive generative art across its 24 screens. This content is built around seasonal visual themes such as “Present” (the current life and energy of the city) and “Past” (a nod to the maritime history of the city described by the sea and elemental change). The generative nature of the visuals and the soundscapes ensures the artwork remains constantly evolving and deeply connected to its environment. A third mode, “Structure,” acts as the installation’s heartbeat, marking the passage of time with clean, geometric visuals, triggered every 15min. The experience is enhanced by a surround sound system with six speakers and presence detection sensors in each totem, allowing the visuals to react to the audience.
Rugby AI Portraits
A mobile-first experience created for the Women’s Rugby World Cup where visitors take a selfie to generate a custom comic-book-style rugby hero avatar. These personalized avatars were then displayed dramatically across the totems, making fans part of the spectacle and blending sports fandom with gaming culture. The system was accessible globally via a web link upon scanning a QR code. In it’s first day, it gathered over 3000 users generating almost 5000 images in just one day.
The AI generation was performed entirely locally on the rendering servers, including the image generation, background subtraction, face substitution, pose correction and the final compositing. A custom LORA was trained for ensuring the desired style. After optimizations, the generation time was reduced to around 6-7 seconds per image on an Nvidia 4080 GPU.
Collaborative DJ & VJ Experience
This experience was developed for the Stages music festival in the city, to serve as an interactive standalone stage. Realtime procedural techno music was driving the visuals through MIDI while the audience could alter both using a simple mobile web-based mixer. Up to 6 people at a time could affect different instruments through volume and effects, creating a unique experience each time. Upon scanning a QR code, users are either shown the interface for a specific instrument or put in a queue to wait until one frees up.
