As resently featured on TheFeast.com by Matt Duckor: For the past eight years, Product Designer Dean DiPietro has thrown a yearly, legendary party at his loft in Brooklyn known as The White Party. "Each year we kept getting more and more ambitious and, by the fifth year, I thought of the illuminated dance floor." He hoped the PAL9000 (the name references both 2001: A Space Odyssey and his apartment's nickname—The Park Avenue Lounge) invokes memories of classic club culture in New York, making his loft feel more like Paradise Garage than a place someone actually calls home. Not only is it an excellent way to get people dancing, but it's also an example of extreme DIY at its finest.

"It's really simple. It's deceptively simple," explains DiPietro. The 8'x12' floor is composed of three, 4'x8' panels, each containing 136 lights and held together by plywood, cardboard, and polycarbonate. The floor doesn't employ expensive LED lights, but rather uses strings of household, everyday Christmas lights. The lights are connected to a basic controller, the kind any club with lighting equipment already has, which controls the combination of patterns the floor emits. Even with this set of familiar components, the floor withstands the ultimate DIY test: "You can't see the do-it-yourself until the lights are on."

Lately, the dance floor has left the confines of DiPietro's loft for venues like last week's final Kiss and Tell party at Rose (the party will continue at Hotel Chantelle) and this year's Burning Man festival. In April, PAL9000 will appear at the Communikey Festival of Electronic Arts in Colorado.



List of Features:
• 96 sq ft of floor available in 3, 4ft x 8ft panels
• Modular design as a dance floor, exhibition stands or fashion catwalks
• Can be mounted vertically on a wall for video and photo back drops.
• 16 pre-programmed patterns
• 16 customizable color channels
• Kaleidoscope color pallet - fire, lemon, ocean and lime
• Syncs to the beat using built in sensors
• Easy to operate and sets up in minutes
• Mod styling with illuminated pixel effect
• Runs on US standard 120v/60hz outlets

For more information on the PAL9000, including rental rates, visit DiPietro's website wehavethenight.com