A pendulum hangs from the ceiling, with an omnidirectional bar code scanner as the bob (the weight) at the end of the cable. The scanner casts an intense red laser beam downward as it skims the floor, reading symbols printed on a 12 foot diameter bar code carpet. A projected image covers the carpet, generated by a video projector mounted high above on the ceiling. An octagonal railing surrounds the pendulum and carpet, with holsters for eight pneumatic air-guns, disguised as ordinary hair dryers. Participants can influence the pendulum's path over the bar code carpet by aiming the hair dryers and shooting blasts of air.
The scanner swings back and forth, constantly reading the various bar codes. This information is transmitted (as ASCII characters) to a Macintosh G4 computer. There are approximately 1500 unique
three-character bar codes printed in a spiral pattern emanating from the center of the bar code carpet, each with an unique address, which the software can use to determine the location and path of the pendulum.
Rather than allowing a sense of a bounded cause-and-effect interaction, the air gun/pendulum interface is always a bit out of control. It is very direct, but it doesn't allow users to select particular bar codes to scan. The pendulum will always already be swinging back and forth along a particular path, repeating its actions more or less exactly each time (losing a bit of momentum with each swing). By shooting blasts of air, users can alter this path, initiating a new (potentially endless) loop. Of course, the greater the number of simultaneous users, the less repetitive (and the more chaotic) the pendulum's path will be. Each path represents a kind of virtual machine, each made of elements that can be recombined and resequenced endlessly.
The relationship of the scanner/pendulum to the projected image is constantly changing, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly. Users can attempt to steer the pendulum, but it will always remain somewhat unpredictable. At all times, the scanner/pendulum works as a TOOL that operates on the image below. Sometimes the pendulum acts like a kind of CHISEL or ROUTER, cutting grooves through images to expose other images hidden below. Repeated passes will widen these grooves until certain images become completely exposed and dislodged. At this point the
pendulum becomes a kind of MAGNET, dragging bits of images along its path. At other times the pendulum acts as a kind of RADAR, updating the parts of the image that it swings over, or a VACUUM CLEANER, sucking up images; a distorting LENS; a BRUSH, a BROOM, and so on. These various functions are reinforced by the use of appropriate sound effects.
Workaholic refers to the pendulum both as the prototypical timekeeping device (Galileo's great discovery of 1583), as well as the protoypical machine, ceaselessly producing work (force times displacement) - in this case images and the transformation of images.
(Perry Hoberman)