abstractmachine

• Event: ENIAROF 0.2
• Organisation / ENIAROF: Antonin Fourneau
• Organisation / ENIAROF Video Arcade: Stéphane Cousot, Antonin Fourneau & Douglas Edric Stanley
• Video Arcade: Atelier Hypermedia, Atelier de Recherches Interactives
• Video Arcade Attractions: Jean-Baptiste Alfonsi, Fabien Artal, Timothée Baschet, Pauline Bétrancourt, Sylvain Boutroue, Emilie Brout, Marjorie Brunet, Thomas Cheneseau, Pascal Chirol, Morgane Conan, Caroline Delieutraz, Florent Deloison, Antonin Fourneau, Liza Gabry, Anthony Giroud, Raphaël Isdant, Tomek Jarolim, Wael Koudaih, Arnaud Laurens, Pierre-Erick Lefebvre, Maxim Marion, Nicolas Moncasi, Douglas Edric Stanley, Bastien Vacherand, Qian Xu
• Technical assistance: Laurent Costes & Jean-Pierre Mandon
• Location: L’école supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Date: 1 + 2 December, 2006
• Hours: 19h – 23h (Friday), 16h – 23h (Saturday)
• Website: ENIAROF
• Blog: blogEniarof
• Price: 1€ – 6€ (roll of dice at ticket counter)

Why no news recently about ENIAROF? Well, we are officially swamped, but happily so. I promise (really, no really) to get some more workable pictures online as soon as possible. Probably Friday afternoon, or if I want to sleep sometime during the weekend. Also the playable ENIAROF-simulator for Gameboy will appear online on Friday just in time for the event itself (playable via gamecard or emulator if you don’t have a Gameboy). Most of the code is finished, we just have to finish the credits, which is the hard part because were so busy finishing this:

…and this…

…and more! (I’m starting to sound like a user car salesman).

At the latest count there are currently 25 attractions being built during our two-week workshop in time for ENIAROF (open for business December 1st and 2nd, i.e. soon). Actually, 25 is a conservative estimate, because they keep popping up each time I turn my head. We’ve sort of gone overboard this time, but even if we are insane, it’s also normal given how quickly Processing and Arduino lets us build our prototypes. Some of the newer students are fighting with Processing a bit, but almost everyone gets Arduino immediately, especially those who probably would have dropped out from all the code.

Let’s see, what do have we so far, hmmm, « Tout le monde s’appelle Marcel Marceau » (an ingenious use of ReacTIVision), « Frite Fighter » (using Pool Floatees and live actors to remote-control play street fighter), « SADE » (with, um, this flourescent thing — and yeah, Arduino controls its motor), « Bzzzzz » (don’t ask), « La chasse » (yes, if you speak French, it means what it means), pretty little poetic things like the « Pitch-Pong » (play pong with an FFT), « MadNES » (80’s TV-set becomes the Joystick), « Tekken Drum » (play Tekken with a drumset), « Immortel Combat » (vote for your favorite politician with a boxing glove), and a BIG fluffy teddy bear that really wants to play with you (« L’ours mal leché »). There’s a lot more. For example, one that I really like (hmmm, can’t find the name) lets two players choose their game caracter solely using their thumbprint as input. The game then takes over from there and plays out the game for you (no other input required) based on your scanned biometric information. Who wins depends on whatever eugenist code it’s creator (Nicolas) has thrown into the game’s design. There’s a lot more. Better just let everyone install everything and post some decent pictures then.

We’ll only be running for two days, so we just have to pull together enough string, wire, tape and glue to make it all work.

Here are some pictures I took this afternoon of some of the non-electronic « attractions » that are already set up. There will be more. If it’s too small to see, note that these are like those signs you see at zoos, etc., where you can take a picture of your head in the mouth of a lion, etc…

This is an itsy-bitsy post. Just to let people know that Antonin Fourneau and I will be speaking tomorrow (damn! there we go again, make that today) through visioconference and various high-tech remote technologies (i.e. Ben Chang’s hand) to the students of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Transatlab. We will be speaking at 17h00 Aix-en-Provence time, 10 AM Chicago time. Here’s the official announcement:

By day, the Atelier Hypermedia explores the relationship of algorithms to plasticity, and situates itself somewhere at the intersection of generative cinema, modular imagery, interactivity, robotics, simulation, physical computing, networks and play. On off-days it doubles as theoretical partner in the investigation of post-cybernetics and slow real-time systems as the research group PLOT. And by night it wanders further into unknown territories via the monster that is « ENIAROF » — a singular form of attraction for the emerging digital_kaiju culture. At exatly 48 hours before the unveiling of its latest orchestrated public accident, Douglas Edric Stanley and Antonin Fourneau will present « The-Thing-That-Was-Called-ENIAROF », along with other notable productions of the Atelier Hypermédia, though a video conference with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. November 29th, 2006. 10:00 CST / 17:00 CET.

Oh, why « Transatlab » ? Well, of course, officially we were thinking of something like this:

But in reality, it’s probably something more like this:

…and maybe even this:

Final quick post before the workshop tomorrow… um, crap, look at the time… that would be today. You can find a simple tutorial en français here on how to configure Arduino and Wiring. More examples will follow, of course.

processing[11] = “Arduino|Wiring” ;

Pour ceux qui seront au cours demain (ou ceux qui veulent suivre en ligne), voici une petite introduction rapide aux cartes Arduino et Wiring. Plus de cours à suivre, comme d’habitude.

Short post for all those who are getting ready (like me) for the ENIAROF Video Arcade workshop which starts tomorrow : I’ve just added a class on how to register noise in Processing and thereby enabling yelling at your computer: processing[10] = “Chanter|Gueuler” ;. This can come in very handy when making video games.

Another article should come later (this evening) on the basics of using Arduino/Wiring with Processing.

More just-in-time-for-ENIAROF portraits to give you an idea about who is behind this project, what sort of things we’re interested in, as well as a glimpse of some of the work produced at the Atelier Hypermedia. This time we’re featuring Antonin Fourneau: inventor and organizer of ENIAROF, researcher at the Atelier de Recherches Interactives (ENSAD), and hacker/artist/coder working in the field of video games.

Here is one of my favorite works of Antonin, which he developped in collaboration with Erational for the FAN project at Villette Numérique 2004:

It’s a mini foldout Ping Pong table with two Gameboy Advance consoles connected to each other via a local network (cf. GameboyPong). The ball is then sent back and forth across its « net » via the digital network connecting the two consoles. This fed into Téléférique’s concept of FAN, which created an actual/virtual mix somewhere between « PC Tuning » (cf. JackyPC), Origami, and networking.

Some aspects of this work grew out of two workshops at the school: PLAY+MOBILE and a workshop with Chris Csikszentmihalyi at the Laboratoire L.O.E.I.L.. He then evolved all of these experiments into two projects which he presented for his diploma in 2005: ENIAROF, an innovative alternative to digital arts festivals (i.e. Villette Numérique); and The Gameboy Nucleus:

Here is a YouTube video, or you can click here for Quicktime format: GBA Nucleus #1, GBA Nucleus #2:

The Gameboy Nucleus explores many of the issues we’re interested in at the Atelier, and is basically a physical externalization of the interior structure of the Gameboy. Each of the components you see here (Music Box, Woodpecker Toy, Button, …) are externalized forms of internal registers in the Gameboy. By connecting them up you activate or change the state of these internal registers, and thereby affect the internal algorithm. Although I have been speaking in my writings and workshops for many years about the spatialization of algorithms and the externalization of code, I never actually thought of it in such concrete terms. It really is fascinating to see how he designed it. I also find the drawings just as interesting as the actual working forms: it’s interesting to see how he created physical forms of counters (« i++ »), loops (« for(;;) »), randoms (« rand()% »), and so on. It’s quite lovely to hold code in your hands like that.

Here is a photo of one another work from about the same period, one of his contributions to ENIAROF, the Pince Vocale (scream to get an origami robot out of the onscreen « factory » game and into your hands):

Since September 2005, Antonin has been at ARI in Paris, where he has been expanding this work into a whole series of game console manipulations, some of which he presented at the Tokyo Dorkbot in late September:

One of these works, the Noisy Nucleus was also featured as one of the installations at this year’s Festival Emergences (note: as mentioned previously here, ENIAROF was given « carte blanche » at the festival this year, as a sort of bar-room entertainment between musical acts; a role we were — for once in our lives — happy to fill, given the nature of the project). The central idea to the Noisy Nucleus is that the output of one video game or console (joystick, video output, sound, etc) can be used as input into another video game. He basically hacks into the protocol of various game peripherals (SNES, etc), and creates a transcoder/recorder, allowing signals of one machine to pass into another. For example, while playing streetfighter you can also be mixing a breakcore soundtrack

Click the above images for this Quicktime video clip taken from Antonin’s presentation at ARI.

Finally, for this year’s Arborescence, he and Jankenpopp built a series of ENIAROF-style video game consoles. Two of Antonin’s proposals are worth mentioning. The first is a street-fighter with only one joystick: you basically fight against yourself. In the second, the « jump » button has been connected to the video output of Donkey Kong: whenever you jump the screen goes black; and since you have to jump a lot in Donkey Kong, this makes the game very hard to play:

Here’s a YouTube clip of the modified Street Fighter:

And then finally, comes this year’s ENIAROF, which Antonin is frantically preparing as we speak:

I will mention this later on the blog as we get closer, but if you happen to be at the Chicago Art Institute at the end of the week, Antonin and I will be giving a webcast presentation on the last wednesday of this month (11:00 am). This is part of our cross-atlantic teaching collaboration. We’ll see if we can record that somehow and put it onto some podcast (haven’t gotten around to making one yet).

Yet another in-preparation-for-ENIAROF post. This time we’re looking at a recent series of small video games that inspired us for the design of the workshop. The series is called bitgenerations, and is further proof that Nintendo currently is hovering just about as close as a multinational corporate video game company can to coolness. Just when it looked like the Gameboy platform was on its last legs (well, maybe it still is), Nintendo releases this very elegant, simple and very playable series of more or less abstract games. 3xd matrixes and pixelshaders are totally absent here, we’re talking hardcore pixels. Some of it is so simple that it could almost have been designed for the Atari 2600. It certainly feels like a nod to Nanoloop (which really opened up the Gameboy platform), especially when you listen to the soundtracks which have been designed with a lot of care, and un certain goût for 4-bit noise generators.

The original of the whole lot is Soundvoyager which I like to play while walking around Aix-en-Provence. No, that doesn’t get me hit by a bus, because Soundvoyager is a game you play entirely by listening to the audio. You can easily play the game without looking at the screen, and indeed little by little the images dissapear from the screen as you play anyway, requiring you to navigate within the various games entirely by using your ears. It’s a suprising concept, and is one of those things you have to play in order to understand. But here are some videos anyway, just to give you an idea:

The key to playing is having a good pair of headphones, as all the games use left-right stereo panning.

Some other interesting games are Orbital and Coloris:

Although it isn’t as beautiful as things like lia’s work, it’s definitely trying to wander around the same territories, especially games like Dotstream which is one of my favorites: instead of moving sprites, you draw directly onto a scrolling background layer (probably mode 0 in Gameboy programming-lingo). Since the background image is basically a buffer, I’m figuring they’re just drawing directly into it. But since that’s also a tile-only graphics mode, maybe they’re programming in mode 5 (8-bit color, maximum resolution) and creating their own scrolling routine (might be easier).

Going back to games like Scramble, you are in a side-scrolling landscape and have to avoid objects, with the added twist of having to avoid the robot players that are also drawing in the same environment.

If you’re interested in purchasing these games, you can find them at Play-Asia, although they’re probably easy to find on some filesharing network as well, although I don’t know which one. (ok, so, I like the packaging…) For those that are participating in ENIAROF, I will be bringing all of them so you can try them firsthand.

To continue the series on cool student work from the Atelier Hypermédia, and just in time for ENIAROF, comes this small portrait of Jankenpopp (pronounced Jan-ken with a hard J), i.e. Pierre-Erick Lefebvre. Janken has been a longtime collaborator on projects such as 8=8, my assistant for the Objets orientés objet workshop in Genève as well as for the Concrescence algorithmic cinema platform where he contributed significantly to the project. Until recently he was a student in Aix-en-Provence, and is now starting his post-graduate studies in the Atelier de Recherches Interactives at the prestigious ENSAD in Paris. Finally, he and Antonin Fourneau will be bringing the rest of ARI to my Atelier this Tuesday to create the next great noisy, goofy, dopey, thumping, stumbling, bumping, @#!&ing, beeping and booping machines for the ENIAROF Video Arcade.

The first thing you need to know about Jankenpopp is that he’s one of of those kick-ass mashup DJ breakcore dweebs:

He has several online albums you can download at: jankenpopp mp3s, my favorite track being Nova Swap.

The second thing you need to know is that he’s a lazy-ass programmer who makes totally cool mini-software online, i.e. however he feels like it, just piling on the code until he get’s what he wants. Usually it looks something like this (click on images to play, requires Shockwave) :

And then, the final thing you need to know is that all that occasionally gets rolled up into a ball and turned into more complex (and well-programmed) audiovisual musical ensembles where the images/programs play/generate the music:

Both of the above videos are collaborative efforts, but there are certain sections that have his signature all over them.

Oh, and I forgot, although it was also mentioned here earlier: he created the Jankenpopp-666 soundfont, for my Cubed installation at ZeroOne San Jose:

Above are some images of an Apple patent which have just been published by the US Patent Office. It’s an interresting idea: a touch-pad, just like the current Apple trackpad, or a touchable-screen, as in the rumored touch-screen iPod, but that can house different mechanical overlays that convert all or part of the surface into a mechanical device. The more improbable being a joystick (ok, I’d like to see that thing withstand intense gamer pounding), with the more serious being a control surface which is what many people use Macs for already, although they plug in the controller alongside it. These ideas can obviously go in many directions, and I won’t comment them any more here, at least not right now. But while all the (other) geeks out there are salivating, I just wanted to point out that Apple’s idea maybe isn’t all that original, especially when you compare it to this technology I used to play in the 1970’s under the name Magnavox Odyssey (1972):

Ok, so I was feeling a little inspired today, and sort of strung up a pretty diverse plate of references, and along with those from the students and my collegues it was a pretty fun mix. For those that were present, here are at least the few I was able to remember (we went very fast, despite our obsession with slowness ;-). This is a mix of everyone’s links, I can’t remember who brought what to the conversation: Slow Real-Time Systems, Kansas Flatter Than a Pancake, Computer Emotivity, The Room of Desires, Sowana, Eve Future, L’homme machine, John Von Neumann vs. Alan Turing (cf. Alan Turing with breasts), The Turing Test, Eric Cartman, Richard Dawkins, and the Wii, The Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster, The God Delusion, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephan Wolfram, Richard Dawkins & Memes, Probabalistic Robotics, Rube Goldberg Machines, Diet Coke & Mentos, Nucleation, Der Lauf der Dinge, Honda’s Fischli & Weiss rip-off, Widget Workshop vs . Max/MSP, I (heart) Huckabees, Heidegger – The Question Concerning Technology, Prédiction, variation, imprévu, Plotsème, …

There was a lot more, but that’s mostly what we talked about during the morning session.

• symposium: Locus Sonus « Audio Sites »
• speakers: Sebastien Gallet, Samuel Bordreuil, Fabien Vandamme, Claire Renier, Jason Geistweidt, Éric Maillet, Pierre-Laurent Cassière, Jean Cristofol, Élie During, Pascal Broccolichi, Björn Eriksson, …
• location: École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence

I am currently at the third Locus Sonus symposium, listening to Samuel Bordreuil talk about landscape and strategies for urbanist intervention. Terms such as « contraction » and « abstraction », « landscape », and « taskscape », and so on. This morning I caught the last half of Bastien Gallet’s talk where he discussed the ontology and politics of sampling. On the one hand, he apparently situates sampling outside of its technological configuration — as an artistic gesture or logic —, and yet on the other hand smack-dab in the middle as it is the place out of which the gesture becomes political (with implications in the Real of the social), eventually creating a community of samplers that did not need Public Enemy to become a political in act, even if the latter did make this political layer visible.

I will be part of a « table ronde » (oh god, why did I say yes to yet another round table – hate those) tomorrow afternoon. As I have class tomorrow morning and today I have been with the Plotsème theory group, I haven’t followed everything so I don’t know how much I’ll really have to say. But I’m so busy I didn’t have time to prepare anything, hence we decided for a speech-lite.

Update: I’m listening now to Brett Balogh, an exchange student from our collaboration with the Chicago Art Institute. He is doing lovely things with very simple circuits, working mostly with oscillation albeit filtered by feedback loops with the space itself, etc.

I was just reading this interview with Nolan Bushnell (via fluctuat) and sure enough, the former head of Atari was talking smack about the Playstation 3. He’s out of the game console loop, so I suppose his opinion as the head of a former video game empire is worth something (although he is currently developing a new casual gaming restaurant franchise that seems to be missing that japanese touch, côté design). Of course, Bushnell will always have a warm place in my heart — no, not for Pong, I’m talking about all the hours spent on Crazy Climber thanks to the local Chuck E. Cheese’s during my Silicon Valley youth. But while I find his criticism of the Playstation valid, I still couldn’t help hearing an echo of historical irony in his two major claims: the Playstation is doomed because Sony is arrogant and its developer tools suck.

Um, excuse me… Wasn’t Bushnell running Atari when they made the Atari VCS system? I’m sorry to remind people of this, but the VCS is one of the most difficult platforms to program, at least the most difficult I have ever seen (yes, I’ve peeked under the hood, it’s pretty insane). But that didn’t stop the 2600 from becoming one of the most popular video game consoles of all time. The quality of developer tools is one thing, market power and strategic timing is another. Just look at the NeXTStep. Bushnell is right, Sony has thus far screwed up the latter, but it still has the former, so Wii’ll just have to wait.

Ok, that last one was a bad joke, but even a cursory glance should make it fairly obvious which gaming platform I want to develop for.

P.S. hey Sony : cool Rubik’s Cube moves.

Still in preparation for ENIAROF 0.2, and while we’re waiting for things to start, my collegue Ben Chang over at the Chicago Art Institute sent me to Tale of Tales’ Realtime Art Manifesto [link]. He suggested it in relation to our DOGMeNIAROF, and indeed there are many similarities. But they’ve got even better slogans: « Do not render! », « Be a dictator », « Interactivity wants to be free », and other semantically ambiguous slogans. And then there is the last one, which ties in very well with the whole ENIAROF philosophy: « Develop a punk economy ».

In fact, on this last idea is absolutely something that inspired ENIAROF. We’ve been talking quite some time in the Atelier about punk rock, and how it developped not only its own community but its own economy. Of course it got co-opted, but I remember fondly as a youth things such as the Gilman Street Project (which still exists I’m told), along with MAXIMUMROCKNROLL which was always payable in cash. The shows and magazines were cheap, but you still paid for them. They were also easily sneak-in-able and photocopyable, which brings us also to digital distribution and filesharing. These two things are not mutually exclusive. Often, my students confuse anti-globalization with issues of monetary exchange (of any kind), whereas it’s far more instructive to look at the economies of scale rather than getting bogged down on whether or not to pay people for stuff-you-want™ anyway. They looked at me a little screwy last week when I suggested that it’s a good idea to sell your music and software for a few bucks. We were discussing these issues in relation to the recent Microsoft XNA Game Studio announcement for independent developers. They just snickered, « sure iTunes is cool, but it’s always cheaper on Emule ».

« Sell your games! »

All that said, I disagree when it comes to Tale of Tales’ « Game art is slave art » : « Make art-games, not game-art. Game art is just modern art – ironical, cynical, afraid of beauty, afraid of meaning. » I don’t know who they’re referencing here, but I can think of a few, and if so, I don’t agree. While I’m sympathetic to their attitude there, I think there is still a lot of fun to milked out of irony and cynicsm. It’s a little too easy to embrace the populist spirit 100% – down with sophistication and all that hogwash. That’s why I like the ENIAROF spirit – we can be highbrow and lobrow and whatever. What I personally find so interesting about the emerging Kaiju-culture is how it’s both cynical/ironic and fun. Like money and sharing, these two terms are not mutually exclusive.

Update: I forgot to mention that Tale of Tales exhibited their Endless Forest at the ZeroOne festival this summer. It looked very pretty but I didn’t really have time to play with it, unforunately.

Ok, this is one of those things that only an engineer could think of — also known as how to shave off a minute here, a minute there, when you have perfectly better things to do…

Take a look at this photo. It is my Epson R300 printer just after replacing the ink cartridge. It has just made all sorts of spugeeech, zhmurrrr, shpukwaaaaam, shazzaaaam noises. All this takes about a minute. There is a nice little screen on the right that first told me how to do things, and when I was ready it asked me to press OK. In French we say, « jusqu’ici, tout va bien » (up to this point, everthing’s going fine). And that’s when all the smuuuuunch sounds whirr and buzz and I go back upstairs to print out my document, figuring that the printer can take care of things from here.

Ah, but no. Of course it can’t be that simple…

Once I’ve shlepped my way upstairs, my computer still won’t print. Hmm. Wifi troubles? Trying pinging the damn thing. Nope. Not Wifi. So I trek back down to my printer to see what I’ve done wrong, and there I find this glorious, « user-friendly », i.e. over-zealous-engineer-message-of-love :

« Ink Cartridge Replacement. Ink cartridge replacement is complete. Press OK to finish. »

Sheesh. Couldn’t it just have pushed the damn OK button itself? Do the Epson engineers really think that I want to spend 1 minute watching my printer go whrrrr, pliiing, shmeeeeerunk? What, do they want a pat on the back? Hey printer, that was a beautiful spectacle of engineering! Good job!

And can someone tell me why on earth I have all those buttons to begin with? I remember the good-old-days of our Apple printer at school that had one button. Yep. One button. And in most instances you never had to push it, since it’s plugged into a computer. And the computer already knows how to push buttons by itself.

• website: EasyDesign
• artist: Pascal Chirol
• link: http://www.easydesign.fr/

Continuing the series on interesting student work…

Pascal Chirol has just arrived this year, and has been working alongside our merry ragtag gang at the Atelier Hypermedia where he is currently maturing his Flash skills into a deeper understanding of object-oriented programming while learning Processing & Java. Later, he will be connecting up physical interfaces to his programs with my collegues at LOEIL (should be interresting).

He is also fine-tuning a hillarious and yet quite elegant, and usable (!) website he created as a student at the École régionale des beaux-arts de Valence where he studied with some of the rare (but growing) French art professors hip to generative design, interactivity, programming, etc. (cf. Luc Dall’armellina). His project is called EasyDesign and it generates beautiful vector-based imagery for you, so you don’t have to.

The part that I find hillarious is that you can also ask it to build you a poster in the style of John Maeda or the French design superstars M/M Paris. For an untrained eye, I’m sure it’s pretty damn close! There is also « Easy Swisse » (LOL), and all sorts of other jokes for anyone who has gone to design school (luckily I avoided all that).

Along with Maeda’s « Design Machine », Pascal’s work clearly references things like Autoshop, Vectorama, Josua Davis (who already is a bit of his own « easydesign », isn’t he?), and anything Jürg Lehni (Hektor, Scriptographer, Lineto, Lego Font Creator). I’m sure there are others that should be mentioned, but I immediately think of those four.