The Game Machine allows for the creation of fully-functioning video games using a drag and drop interface. This prototype was designed during a residency at the Villa Arson in 2000.
The Sound Object Undulation Processor (or S.O.U.P.) allows for the visual as well as aural spatialisation of video images. Projecting onto the floor within an installtion equipped with an 8 or 10-speaker configuration, these video sequences can be spatialized through this switchboard device. Images are entered into the S.O.U.P., mixed, remixed, and spread about the floor using various movement algorithms, for example movements taken from the Broyeur. Movements can also be recorded by users in real-time, allowing for complex live video mix-loops, created by dragging sound/images in and out of the S.O.U.P. center (thus affective it’s volume/spatialization) and then letting the loops play back over and over under modified again.
The code from this switcher has been used within several student projects at the Atelier Hypermedia and has been repurposed into some of my current work. It interfaces easily with a Max/MSP patch specifically written for it.
The above illustration shows a demonstration of S.O.U.P. being used to re-edit Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Vertigo”.
Update: the Broyeur has now been updated to use the iconography of the abstractmachine blog, as I no longer have easy access the current image folder of the art school. Use the above link to play! with it.
This interface was designed for the Aix-en-provence School of Art. It was intended as a demonstration of the design guidelines I had created for the school, with the logic of interweaving icons, representing the different ateliers. The overtly experimental nature of the school, and its interdisciplinary approach to new technologies was represented best through a digital soup forming some kind of organic object in mouvement. This interface, now used as a presentation device, was entitled “Le broyeur”, after Marcel Duchamp’s famous displacement of a chocolate mixer used as sexual foreplay.
The sound came from a student, Julien Hô-Kim‘s work with scratched and damaged digital media. The mouvement itself was something of a fluke, originally coming about when a sinus was incorrectly calculated. Happy accidents are not only welcome, they are often a requisite to artistic creation.
The idea of multiple intersections with the mouse is part of an ongoing investigation into the idea of interactive multiplicity – interacting with several elements at once. This principle is used often in good computer games, and is here simply placed at the forefront.
The interface is dynamic and adapts itself to whatever contents reside in the database. The interface has been used for all sorts of programs, as a web navigator for example, or as an image browser.
It is a well-known fact that the brilliant but troubled “father” of French psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, owned the scandalous 19th century painting by Courbet, L’origine du monde. It is also a well established fact that Lacan kept the painting hidden in his country residence, notably behind another painting he had comissioned fromMasson. Special guests were allowed quick peeks of the ‘dirty painting’, through a system designed around a simple hinge.
The website “X vues sur l’origine” (X views of the origin) was created in 1998 for the exhibition L’image n’est pas seule, however has not been officially viewed by any afficionados of high art. In fact there was no official link to the website. One can only reach the site through on-line search engines, where one must type sexist explicatives in order to fall onto the link. Once there, one is met with a series of “views” onto the origin [1, 2, 3, 4, ...] based on Lacan’s infamous “functions” of the psyche: Objet petit ‘a’, Aphanasis, Alétheia, -PHI…
With each view of the origin, a page counter is augmented, affecting the painting according to whichever of the algorithms or functions has been chosen. In the case of the -Phi (the little phallus in Lacanspeak) the painting shrinks with each visit. The Aphanasis function causes the image to fade, and the Objet ‘a’ takes a pixel out of the image, one per visit.
Update: Due to the success of the views, there are no longer any visible images on the website.
