FLY CARVING DEVICE
In this installation, one hundred live houseflies control a 5 axis CNC router as it carves a block of foam.
The flies move and interact inside an acrylic sphere as a camera tracks their motion. This motion is processed with custom software and mapped to the code used to control the axes of the CNC machine. When a single fly is detected, the machine simply follows the movements of that fly. If several flies are in the field of view, the software moves the machine based on the activities of the collective. In this way, the flies are the brain of the CNC machine, determining where, when, how fast, and how deep to carve the foam.
