- Machine: Broyeur
- Concept + Developpement: Douglas Edric Stanley
- Video : Original Broyeur Interface
- Exhibition: Milia 2000
- Play!
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.
