Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts

M-Machine allows for its audience to interact not only musically but visually as well. “It functions like a musical instrument, but instead of just steering sound, you steer animation as well, and the machine lets you be a composer,”

Marieke Verbiesen has been invited by the Hiroshima International Animation Film Festival to present her interactive installation “M-Machine”. “M-Machine” is an audiovisual instrument that can be controlled by the user and combines various diffrent technologies in one.

Verbiesen wants people to be able to create “mayhem” through a series of knobs, dials, and buttons that activate animations onscreen with accompanying sounds. Some of these parts require more than just pushing a button, such as the bit-crusher voice sampler and the bad guitar solo joystick. Another interesting facet of the Mayhem Machine is the noise generating finger pad. The functionality of the Mayhem Machine is discovered through playing and trying out all of the tools available to the player.

In Mayhem Machine, Sound, Interaction and Animation create a symbiotic relationship and meaning.
The animations and sounds create different stories by showing in non linear sequences which the audience controls in a playful manner.

The animations are based on animation principles stemming from Golden Age Cartoons, at the turn of the century.
Golden Age Cartoons, created the meaning “Language of Vision”, the cohesion between cartoon motion and sound; Striving for a symbiotic image and sound experience in which animation could allocate itself a new function in which animations could be created and experienced as a dynamic experience instead of a linear experience.

The International Animation Festival Hiroshima is a biannual animation festival hosted in Hiroshima, Japan. The festival was found in 1985 by Association International du Film d’Animation or ASIFA as International Animation Festival for the World Peace. The city of Hiroshima was one of the sights of nuclear bombings in 1945 at the end of World War II and it was chosen to inspire thoughts of unity through the arts. The festival is now considered one of the most respected animated festivals, along with Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival, and Zagreb World Festival of Animated Films.

Hiroshima International Animation Film Festival: http://hiroanim.org/en2016/