Calvin Harris uses skin-safe conductive ink to perform his new single on the bodies of 15 models.

It's no secret British pop star Calvin Harris likes to surround himself with beautiful women in music videos. Now, thanks to a special ink that conducts electricity, he's found a way to perform his latest single on the bodies of 15-bikini clad models.

The skin-safe conductive ink, Bare Conductive, was invented by Royal College of Art industrial design engineering students, Bibi Nelson, Becky Pilditch, Isabel Lizardi and Matt Johnson. When painted on the body, it acts as an electric grid and can create sounds when the wearers touch each other to complete the circuitry.

Sony Music digital creatives Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne read about the technology on a blog post and contacted the students about collaborating on a musical project for one of the label's artists. Two months passed before Harris, a pop musician/producer, expressed interest in the idea.

"We knew he would be a good fit because he's an electronic music producer who's very knowledgeable about music technology and very enthusiastic about it," says Clandillon. "And from the aesthetic point of view, Calvin is all about surrounding himself with pretty girls. We needed to be able to show the paint so the two things came together."

The ‘Humanthesizer' - a term coined by Harris - consists of 34 pads on the floor painted with the ink and connected to a giant MIDI controller and custom software created by Johnson using the program Max/MSP. When the painted performers stand on the pads and touch each other, they complete a circuit and trigger a sound.

The shoot took place over three days in Jerwood Space, a dance studio in London. Clandillon and Milbourne divided the performers into two musical groups: a troupe of professional dancers who would enact the more complex rhythm section and a synthesizer-sounding section comprising 15 models to be played by Harris.

Calvin Harris plays his new single on the skin synthesizer.

The Jerwood Space dance studio was lined with 34 pads painted with conductive ink.

Milbourne, who is a classically-trained guitar player and former session musician, re-arranged a stripped-down version of "Ready For the Weekend". To activate different samples and piano sounds used throughout the song, Harris had to touch a specific model on the left who was designated as a "switch".

"When Calvin touched her it flipped on the sounds we needed for the chorus," says Clandillon. "There were a couple of one-time samples we were triggering on the right as well."

After two days of rehearsal, Clandillon and Milbourne managed to recreate the song in one day. Despite their preparedness, Bare Conductive is still in the prototype stages, so there were a few unforeseeable hitches.

"Some people prove not to be as conductive as others," explains Clandillon. "It turned out to be dietary and also to do with various biological issues. It depends on the amount of salt that people have in their system that makes them more conductive."

To remedy the problem the crew layered the less-conductive models with more paint. In the end, only one of the women absolutely couldn't conduct electricity with ink alone. "We actually had to tape a wire to the back of one model to shorten the distance the electricity was traveling," he says. "She was particularly troublesome."

Another issue was the room's temperature. Though the two rehearsal days were dry, the humidity on the shoot day caused the ink on the pads to melt, creating a mess on the floor. "That came out of nowhere," says Clandillon. "We ended up having to get some talc out and put it on people's feet to absorb some of the moisture."

Despite the problems and the miniscule production budget, Clandillon is happy with the end result and expects Bare Conductive will only improve as a result of their musical experiment.

"The great thing about it is that it's cheap, it's non-toxic and it's washable," says Clandillon. "But it's essentially still a prototype. It's something they're still developing. Some of the issues we ran into will be fed back into the process of developing the ink and that will make it better."

Watch the "Ready for the weekend" video here and check out the ‘making-of' video here.

work.clandillon.com
www.bareconductive.com
www.sonymusic.co.uk