Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Machinista Are Go
The Machinista Glasgow pre-launch last night was good fun, in the way that only multilingually presented Russo-Scottish software demonstrations can be.
Festival founder Sergei Teterin showed selected submissions from last year’s festival. The best of these was a piece that consisted of some simple instructions for setting up a default Windows screensaver, which bounces text around the screen. By choosing the lowest resolution and largest text size, and setting the text to a single full stop, the screensaver becomes a huge square that tries to bounce around the screen, but is too big to manage more than a few twitches. It doesn’t sound like much but this inventive ‘programming’ within the constraints of the default screensaver package was neatly matched by the frustrated, constrained square on screen. Unfortunately, I can’t find the submission details on machinista.ru, so can’t give credit to the artist(s).
Also of note: IXI’s set of music performance tools with novel interfaces. Lauki (screenshot) is the best of these. It allows you to manipulate and trigger samples by clicking and dragging coloured boxes around, affecting the pitch and timbre of the sounds. Seriously addictive.
Last but not least, Sergei showed off his latest piece: Mincer. It’s a table-top kitchen mincer modified to serve as an input device. Winding the mincer’s handle scrolls through images, turning a laptop into a hand-cranked projector. Fittingly enough, Sergei used it to screen excerpts from Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man With A Movie Camera, which prominently features the titular bloke furiously cranking his camera. It went on a bit, to be honest, but the concept is an interesting one.
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