abstractmachine

• Workshop: PLAY+MOBILE
• Artists: Douglas Edric Stanley & Stephane Cousot
• Participants: Thomas Michalak, Pierre-Erick Lefebvre, Antonin Fourneau, Daniel Urbain, Loïs Roussillon, Cécile Boissimon, Benjamin Hochart
• Location: Atelier Hypermedia, Aix-en-Provence Art School
• Dates: January 5-9 & 12-16, 2004
• Website: http://hypermedia.loeil.org/playmobile/
• Demo: play+mobile demo (mp4)

Stéphane Cousot and I have successfully completed the workshop PLAY+MOBILE, in participation with 7 students from the Aix-en-Provence School of Art and one student from the Bordeaux Art School. The workshop focused principally on reappropriating the Gameboy Advance platform, through the creation of artistic experiments designed specifically for it.

The programs built during the workshop were for the most part influenced by the idea of musical instruments, drum machines, etc., and used the internal synthesizer of the Gameboy circuit.

One of the more interesting experiments on the platform was built on the first day of the workshop. While moving around a little “Hello World” text field, one of the students discovered that by printing the text outside of the reserved video memory registers, the “Hello World” text would write into various hardware registers of the machine and affect output. We have recorded this behaviour in the play+mobile demo (mp4) video.

All programs were built either with C or DragonBasic.

Playmobile Development tools were built either by Stéphane Cousot or myself, and were designed to simplify the programming process, especially on Mac OS X. The website was built by Stéphane Cousot, and designed by Stéphane, Pierre-Erick Lefebvre and Douglas Edric Stanley.

Here are some Programs you can play/download. To view them, you will need a Gameboy Advance with a programmable cartidge, or you can use an emulator such as Boycott Advance. Stéphane included an in-browser Java emulator, but it’s pretty buggy and sound doesn’t work (the whole point). At least it gives you an idea of the programs before downloading them:

• Cécile Boissimon & Daniel Urbain
• Pierre-Eric Lefebvre
• Benjamin Hochart
• Antonin Fourneau
• Thomas Michalak
• Stéphane Cousot (cf. “Partition”)

Over the Christmas break, Lola Daisy and I created a bunch of simple games for the Hypertable. A lot of the games were just simple variants on Pong! But our favorite is a game we call Smash It! The game is based on the fact that the Hypertable can tell which direction movements come from: i.e. on which side of the table the interactors are.

The game is simple. Each player stands on one side of the table. The table waits until no hands are on it, then quickly pops out a little pixel from one of the edges which starts zipping around like a fly. The first to slap the pixel wins. Then the table waits for hands-off, and starts all over again.

The game is totally rediculous. Which makes it all the more brilliant. There are no points, and the only pleasure it really just the fact that you get to smash this stupid little pixel (and probably sprain a couple muscles in the process). The more you put your body into it, the more fun the game is.

During Lola’s birthday party today (she’s born on the 1st of January) we put on SmashIt! I thought they’d play it for a few minutes then tire. Well, we ended up having to drag the kids off when the party was over. They played it for hours. I don’t know if SmashIt! would work for all kids, but kids her age (seven) sure seemed to get into it.

Actually, I have to credit Pierre-Erick who first suggested we make simple games with the Hypertable while we were getting ready for the exhibition Créer du sens à l’ère numérique. We’d been slaving for weeks over the thing, he suggested, and we weren’t having any fun with it. While taking a quick dinner break, I whipped up a Pong as a response, and had some fun that we probably shouldn’t have been having considering that I had an installation to finish a few days later. Here are some pictures from Pierre-Erick and Lola playing Pong :

• Machine: twothousandfour
• Concept+Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Play!

Happy New Year!

Here’s an interactive greeting card to welcome you to all the great things that await us in 2004.