Enlightenment is likely the highest resolution live digital artwork ever created. It animates 41 million pixels in real time, and over the course of its five-week installation in the summer of 2006, it generated 125 million frames of animation – more than 18 petabytes of video data.

The artwork’s output is too big to store even if it were our intent to do so (but of course we conceived the piece from the start as a live performance.)

Working score

The program written specifically for Enlightenment comprises more than one-quarter million lines of code. Among the challenges it surmounted are: dynamic planning (rather than reactive graphics); live scheduling; high-definition optical flow analysis of video; and the dynamic re-editing of sound and image.

The working score we used in shaping the piece illustrates how the code was deployed to generate the four phases of the work.