When Microsoft developed the Kinect—a TV mounted gesture recognition device used for at-home bowling and dance games, they also accidentally created a way for artists to engage the technology as a medium in and of itself. After the Kinect hit the market, a hacker developed an open source driver for it, meaning anyone could download the software, buy a Kinect from your local game store, and see exactly what it sees: baroque arrays of live polygon rendering that people have used to generally experiment with the realtime abstraction of human forms. Is Microsoft the post-modern Medici? The video above from PBS Idea Channel puts it to you in fun-size laymen’s terms.