Machina d'amore

By Andreja Andric & Igor Vasiljev

MACHINA D'AMORE explores the position of human intimacy in the age of digital civilization. Technology brings people closer to each other, but is it really so? What about hugs and kisses in the cyber world? In order to set the 19th century mechanical automaton in motion, a light effort was needed to wind the spring with the thumb and index finger. Nowadays, not even that is required. In Machina d'amore, automatism is inscribed in the very structure of the automaton. Entirely disregarding the development of computer graphics, animation has been automatized by the text of the software so that in the end it appears through the text -- of poetry.
This collage based work makes use of poetry by Giambattista Marino and Torquato Tasso, movie inserts from Casablanca and Showgirls (among others), piano music by Andreja Andric, and piano playing by Ana Zorana Brajovic.

Technical details: The development of this work is based on a program that transforms any given photograph into a text of the same shape, for any given textual proposal. This program, developed by the authors, is written in the programming language C. The rest of the effort was to rework several famous movie-kisses (freely available on the Internet) frame by frame into this form. This short movie consists of about 500 frames, and every single frame was dealt by separately, in the previously described way. The piano music in the background has been originaly composed by Andreja Andric.

Other awards, festivals: Presented at the DigitalClip festival, Torino, Italy (see http://blucomfort.com/digitalclip_eng/). Also, permanently exhibited in the Transpoetics online gallery (see http://www.transpoetics.org).

Piano player's diary

By Andreja Andric

Piano Player's Diary is a program for MS-DOS/Windows that produces romantic piano improvisations in MIDI format. The titles of the pieces are chosen like in a diary: date and time of the moment of creation. The mood and tonality changes from piece to piece, thus forming a unique contrasting cycle of pieces. No input is required. Just start the program and it will create a MIDI file with a new improvisation.

Technical details: The program Piano Players Diary is written in programming language C, for MS-DOS/Windows operating system. It is a result of my recent investigations in music algorithms and programming generators of music. The usage of the program is extremely simple. Just start it, and a whole new composition is generated and stored in a MIDI file, in the same folder where the piano_players_diary.exe resides.

The attached zip file contains the program and a number of examples.

Playground

ByAndreja Andric & Igor Vasiljev

On an ideally plain, green, grass surface a small house and a riding horse. They are built up of small children building boxes of equal size. The horse and the house are, in the same time, a music box. A calm children music could be heard. Boxes are covered with pictures which could not be seen from the distance the observer is located on the beginning. When the observer comes closer, he can see that the pictures on boxes are actually elements from the adult world - bans, cuts from daily news, advertisments and other fragments of information and industrial pollution.

The work starts from a mutual relationship between children world and world of adults. Like in children games, the horse calls up to an adveture, while the house offers shelter and peace. The boys most often play adventures or war actions, while the girls quite the opposite: house - family situation. Regularity of geometrical elements and ground and infinite space make an expression of an "utopian" desire. The music, weaved up from bright, transparent, repeating sounds, suggest an atmosphere of children's room, peace, confidence and naiveness. The house and the horse are almost of the same size, the fact that recalls an absence of perspective and irrelevance of size on children drawings, which opposes the world of adults where the "size" is important, often crucial. From far away, both models look like they are built of colorful candies, because on that distance, pictures on the boxes are not readable. Only after comming closer the real content of pictures become clear, and the models get frightening dimensions (blow up effect). By the time flow, the children world become more and more built up of fragments of the world of adults - which is true also literary (manufacturers of toys are again adults). Children games are determined according to the models suggested from the adult world. What are these models like, and what are the hopes in future that can be formed by these models?

The work got First Prize of the audience on the Third Short Electronic Form Feast (http://www.rex.b92.net/kef/00.html), Belgrade, Serbia & Montenegro, November/December 2002.