Most people never saw how a cathode ray tube monitor actually worked. They just saw the image.
This installation, built at Parsons in 2018, makes the mechanism visible. It simulates the pixel-by-pixel scan of a CRT: the beam sweeps line by line, building an image the way the original hardware did. You watch it happen in real time.
Physical sliders on the enclosure change the frequency and brightness of the simulated beam. The mechanism is demonstrated, directly in your hands.
An Arduino runs the hardware. Processing handles the visual output. The whole piece sits inside a laser-cut box designed to evoke a vintage monitor.
The project started with readings by Charles Petzold and Amelia Winger-Bearskin, which pushed me to dig into the physical and computational principles behind early displays. I wanted to understand those principles well enough to make them tangible – to turn an obsolete technology into a hands-on learning object and link the history of computing with physical interaction design.
The source code is on GitHub. Two demo videos and prototype photos are on this page.
