Christine Doempke

Machine Mind

The magnified personality of a machine reacts to its users with its own facial expressions; if the machine likes you, it will sing.

Classes
Video Sculpture


No matter how objective and logical our machines are, they always have their own personalities. Each machine has different "needs" to make it work properly or odd moments when they crash that are unique to that particular machine. What if we could magnify and see the anthropomorphized personality of our machine and interact with it like a creature?
Machine Mind is a machine with a mind of its own. Touch it and it reacts to you with its own restless facial expressions. If it likes you, it will sing.

Audience
Art/video-sculpture audience. People with a quirky sense of humor.

User Scenario
The user approaches a kiosk (an old slide-film projector from 1968) that looks like an computer precursor. There is a restless eye creature squirming in the window of the projector. As the user touches its interface, the creature reacts in a variety of emotions, some surprising. If the creature *likes* the user, it will turn on it's embedded record player and "sing".

Implementation
An old slide-film projector is retrofitted with a pico projector. The slide-film projector looks like a super-retro computer, and the effect is magnified with the modern projections filtered through it.
The projector is projecting images running live from Jitter in a macbook pro hidden under the platform. The user touches FSR's which communicate with an arduino, also hidden in the slide-film projector, and the touch data changes the projections through Jitter.

Conclusion
Lining up projectors with multiple mirrors to get just the right projection from around a corner is tricky. Also it's crucial to have the right video codec for quicktime clip so that MAX/Jitter will play nicely with big files