Across the street from Brandon's apartment is this restaurant Zen that we go to sometimes. They have these crazy video installations playing that customers watch while they eat. Their "Zen" station includes mostly art videos on the idea of "Zen" or "stillness" or "being one with nature." They also have a lot of crazy animations and random nature scenes.

Brandon and I had talked about this idea of Ambient TV many times before. We like the idea of having ambient-style video installations in a house to watch while you wander around the house, cooking, or just hanging out. To me, the content for a house might include video installation-style art videos, animations, and other content that Zen's video set-up has, but I also wanted to incorporate home movies into it.

I built this prototype to try out the idea. In an ideal situation the video would be broadcasted over a network to multiple LCD panels around the home (one in the kitchen, one in the hallway, and so on) from a central server. Brandon also likes the idea of getting content directly from the web. We might try this out in the future.

This project is made with

• My laptop, which stored played the 8 minute ambient-style video.
• An LCD monitor connected to the laptop, which was taped to the inside of a cardboard box.
• A cardboard box, which was cut and painted to look like a wall-mount for the LCD monitor.

Click video to stop, double click to start it up again.