Compliment Machine

☁️ give me your hand and receive a compliment ☁️

Compliment Machine is both a physical machine that gives the spectator-interactor a compliment (it both says the compliment and prints it out via a thermal printer) upon interacting by means of indicated palmistry, as well as a virtual-digital exhibition of various prototypes and ideas that I had in mind for it at various stages. Several iterations on the design can be experienced here, and the earliest prototype is the most fleshed out/functional one of these virtual machines, even though it uses/would just use a simple button press.

[E] to turn on this prototype / [Space] to generate compliments / [E] again to turn it off / [Esc] to switch from the side-rooms into the main hub again

This machine is not dissimilar to my digital 50 Shades of Unity Default Skybox machine, this too is a digital machine with an analog vibe to it. I even at one point thought about just turning this one into a physical machine, but as usual ended up coming up with a different idea.

This work was made for Timm Burkhardt’s class Nutzlose Wunsch-Maschinen – Das elektronische Fest during winter semester 2023/24. Thanks to Timm Burkhardt for advice, feedback and lots of technical support, and who also had the design idea for a more complex interaction via a photoresistor & stuff than what I had initially in mind. Also many thanks to Rael and Salome for helping me with many stuffs.

Compliment Machine will be/is/was publicly presented during winterwerkschau at Bauhaus-University from February 2nd to February 4th 2024. This was my first time presenting an artistic work publically at Bauhaus University, and generally the first time I showed something in that kind of public setting that isn’t just my creative or academic writing. I do provide a download with the Arduino code and Max/MSP project as well, if someone were to recreate a similar machine. (As always, and despite being critical towards institutions in general, I am open to be contacted by museum curators etc if one wants to exhibit this or other works of mine, as well as for lecture performances, academic work and so on.)

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It was suggested to me to use AI as a video actor, but as I regularly engage in doing little performance art myself and as I am developing theatre theories and so on, and as I am kind of a "theatre kid", I explicitly use the little acting opportunity and not hop onto the in multiple ways hugely problematic trend of just using AI. As a writer, and as I wanted to artistically and poetically break the format of the compliment a little bit, I wrote a set of 35 compliments myself, even though partially inspired and in one or two of the more outrageous ones kinda co-authored by The Surrealist Compliment Generator.

This machine was also partly inspired by the "Lester Speaks"-machine in the player’s casino in GTA Online, an examplary video to be seen here.

This artwork of mine can also be contextualized within the internet trend of meta-ironic aff(f)irmations, especially popular within certain spaces on instagram, but also further wide spread and thus surely slowly finding its way into other areas of culture.

I also want to give a lil shoutout to the very helpful tutorial "Printing with Arduino" by upir as well as the page of the Embedded Thermal Printer on dfrobot wiki.

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If I look exhausted in the video material of this work, it is probably because I am. This was yet another tough semester, but luckily also kinda my last one. I actually only took this class (like so so many other classes too at three different universities during my sad university years) because the offered semester program was – yet again – mostly not that interesting to me personally, and if a gyrl is required to do Regelstudienzeit in a capitalist university system severly damaged by the bologna process, and pressured by their parents and complicated living conditions and so on, they must do what they must do. Larger, overarching systemic issues are unfortunately at play here that result in hardships for me and other people, and that of course would require a fundamental re-design of the education system to resolve.

I also was hoping for some theory on the theatrical constellations of the historical Bauhaus festivities to use for my upcoming MFA thesis, and sneaking past crafting & practice by doing theory instead, but well. Take this software then as the chill theory part of it. Despite this probably being the most difficult class I ever took due to me not being competent at all with analog stuff and crafting and product design and all that, and despite me being constantly very overwhelmed with everything, I still managed to extract something out of it, and I am quite happy about the result of this little compliment machine – especially about this accompanying software!!! It was also quite new and financially challenging to me to actually having to buy some stuff, because I otherwise usually do work with free or open source software to create free, or at least cheap, software.

On a side-note, as an autistic person I am not good with all this social stuff, so delegating some of it to a machine, might actually be helpful. (There will be at least one other ludic-artistic project of mine, that is kinda in the making right now, and deals with this stuff too.) Of course, one could think about the image of the clouds as autistic brain fog, which I’ve employed several times before, and to therefore letting a machine carry out the social interactions instead of me. This effect is more emphasized, when I am present at werkschau as a performer looking like the machinic image. (Not to vaguely teaser one top secret major future game project of mine, but here I am kinda cosplaying as myself, or as whatever myself is actually, a kaleidoscope of autistic masks, etc.)

Otherwise, my biggest challenge was to figure out how to run a video and to print out the according compliment with the thermal printer at the same time. Initially, I created a program using Unity, an extended version of it you can now download here, and one could generate a compliment by pressing [Space]. The Keyboard.h library can do this, but wasn’t compatible with my Arduino Uno – so, I used a Gemma M0 at first, but this then wasn’t compatible with the SoftwareSerial.h library that the thermal printer works with, as this library doesn’t seem to be compatible with SAMD boards. In the end, I therefore got into Max/MSP within a week before the deadline and built an application that plays the videos when the photoresistor detects a certain value threshold.

This project can also be considered a follow-up of Sophie Romy and mine 2021 Pflanzenorchester I-VI Hildesheim university project that I want to develop and share a virtual-digital version of in the future.

See also my second idea for something to craft for this class, that I will share later, another and more directly theatrical automaton that I am realizing as a little digital-virtual machine to watch and to vibe with.

// This software in Unity was developed in about 8 crunchy day-nights across a couple of months, and the whole rest of this project took years off my life. //