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Amjumix | Multi-media installation

Tanja Vujinovic: AMJUMIX
Multi-media installation, 2008
shockwave application, slide projection, objects with photo sensors, audio mixer
Programing and sound: Tanja Vujinovic
Original games (Amju Super Cool Pool, Amju Super Golf, Amju Pet Zoo, Amju) and original sound © Jason Colman, www.amju.com
Electronic components: Lenart Kranjc
Producer: Jan A. Kusej
Produced by: Exstat, www.exstat.org

Description of the Project
Amjumix is an homage to the Amju games created by Jason Colman. Functioning as a standalone application, the Amjumix interface enables access to a series of five setups with elements that behave in a semi-unpredictable manner and are dependent on user input. While exploring each set of dysfunctional game screens, each gesture on the screen itself creates additional glitches in the development of the audio-visual samples that are literally continually struggling to come to the surface of the screen or to be reproduced in the case of sound. Sometimes difficult to reach, the only element that allows the user to go the next "level" is indicated when the mouse cursor changes into a clock, enabling the user to circulate endlessly in loops of "levels".

The second part of the Amjumix consists of five plush toys fashioned after the characters from the Amju games. The toys are placed in the proximity of a source of light, coming from a projector that reproduces the glitched scenes from the actual games. Each toy has an photo sensors that responds to the light within its surrounding, and reacts strongly to the brightness and color intensity of the pictures, translating this intensity into electronically processed noise.

Concept of the Project
Being generally interested in the "cuteification" of toys and games, with all of their shapes, psychology, and the social impact they generate, I was happy to encounter the Amju website on the Internet, which offers several games, all revolving around the central character of the same name.
After spending a reasonable amount of time playing and researching the actual games, I decided to create my own "glitched" version of the mysterious world of Amju and Marin, made of numerous truncated video and sound samples that I have retrieved from the process of playing the games which embody the strangeness, frustrations, and navigational difficulties I have encountered in these virtual worlds.
The original Amju games are an outstanding example of the over-exaggerated cuteness of toy-like characters within contemporary culture. The main character, Amju, and her friend Marin come from Amju Games - Super Computer Games for Kids, a web-based computer games production company led by Jason Colman. Colman, who is simultaneously the author of the games available from the web site www.amju.com, immensely enjoys the effects and virtual scapes of the computer games. Amju is a girl-like creature, living a leisurely life among lovely animals which she has to take care of, and occasionally she indulges in games with her friend Marin. Both of them have a similar physiognomy, typical of charming toys - enormous innocent-looking eyes, big heads, and small, equally cute bodies. The animals that appear sporadically, a cat, a chicken, and a fox, have equally exaggerated and simplified facial features and most of the time jog around the space frenetically when unleashed from their petite houses. The game that introduced the whole concept, entitled simply Amju, first appeared in February 2003. The living space of Amju, her backyard with multiple elements that can be moved, is her garden, where she has to take care of the animals by forcing them to return to their little houses. Running around at a frenetic pace, both animals and the little girl most often just miss each other; the girl also has the option of fetching suspended elements - beans and watermelons - that bring her additional points in terms of, for example, extended game time. The newer game, Amju Super Cool Pool is en elaborate pool game with a multitude of charming, pink or classic pool tables. The pool table is placed in an imaginary landscape full of flamboyant trees, amusing animal houses, and spinning hearts. Whenever a player manages to score a point, huge greeting words such as sweet or cool appear above the table, spinning in a rainbow of colorful stars. The charming sweetness of all the characters, Amju, Marin, and all animals that appear in different stages of their digital lives (such as in Amju Pet Zoo) extends to the scapes of their lives and play: the spinning platforms, pink, yellow, and red lollipop-like surfaces, and revolving hearts and stars create their universe. By immersing oneself in these scapes, one can also enjoy the serene and merry melodies that complete the picture. Amju Super Golf introduces a total of 38 complex environments, each one consisting of a multiplicity of platforms, where some of them spin and move in order to make the game full of twists and turns. Some platforms are really difficult to reach and the game is thrilling, again full of charming anchors in forms of hearts, stars, beans, and little toy-like animals. The suspended platforms on which Marin and Amju play golf and score points by hitting hearts, stars, and other elements on the road to the final whole, are floating in the air, and if one of the players accidentally hits the ball too hard, it flies over the platform into a blue abyss. Again, the trauma of looking into the void under the platform is tempered by a sweet tune playing monotonously but yet not in a boring manner, quite the opposite; it is a crucial ingredient in the creation of this virtual world of small and happy creatures. Additional points are gained by hitting the house full of animals, if a player manages to hit an animal with the ball, the characteristic sound of a squeezed rubber toy is heard. The latest game, Amju Pet Zoo, is also a simulation 3D game where one is engaged in building a personal Zoo full of little animals. Separated by a tricky fence, the two spaces in Zoo hold different species. The first space in which Amju's future Zoo is located is filled with popping eggs and trees with growing fruit. After hatching the eggs by breaking them, the player unleashes tiny animals that have to be fed with fruit, but simultaneously kept away from the fence. If a petite animal escapes, an equally cute monster-dinosaur eats it.
According to the popular and humorous Internet blog Cute Overload, and the featured Rules of Cuteness™ (1), the Amju fusion-characters do posses most of the features listed as necessary for the strange robotic and humano-animal world of cuteness: they look helpless, various baby species are present, they mimic humans, adults are usually accompanied by smaller versions of themselves, their food is as big as they are, their heads are oversized and the same size as the rest of their body, animals have tiny tales and ears, the head is somewhat turned down while the eyes look up, to mention just a few. In The Secret Life of Puppets, Victoria Nelson analyzed and traced our need to aestheticise simulacra and infuse them with soul, pointing towards the ritual functions such entities play in our lives. According to her, human simulacra - robots, puppets, and cyborgs carry our unacknowledged belief in the immortality of the soul. In the cluster of ideas in De-forming the Body, Nelson evaluates the grotesque metamorphoses of the body suspended in the transformation of shape. Pointing towards Kafka, as one of the great writers of the metamorphic tradition, she refers to several other authors who have been attracted by the subject. Bruno Schulz, a writer who similarly used amalgams of shapes of people and objects, thought that the migration of forms is without a doubt of essential importance, and that forms are actually inherently unstable. By constantly merging shapes of beings and objects from reality, Bruno Schulz's "human characters metamorphose into enema tubing, doorbells, cockroaches, dogs, piles of ash." (2) Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theoretical work was partially devoted to the similar themes of transition, wrote about bodies that are continually being built and never completed, grotesque bodies that are in the flux of becoming. In the Tailors' Dummies stories, Schulz casts this metamorphic, amorphous transitory creatures as "a kind of pseudofauna and pseudoflora, the result of a fantastic fermentation of matter." (3) These pseudoforms are the result of fusions of various species, suspended at any transitory moment. Pointing towards the definition of grotesque as the fusion of human and non-human elements, Nelson discusses the semi-anthropomorphic creatures omnipresent in our culture. Regarding memory fragments and the content of each of the stances within the process of metamorphosis, she refers to Osip Mandelstam's analogy between the process of growth and the act of remembering: "In both of them there is a sprout, an embryo, some facial feature, half a character, half a sound, the ending of a name…" (4) Through their amorphous and easy to reshape and appropriate nature, toys and dolls serve as a kind of omni-potential canister and device for placing various unsettling, odd, bizarre contents or even monstrous properties and supernatural powers within works of mainstream cinema, literature, and the visual arts.
Regarding both puppets as well as android robots, Lee Worth Bailey noted that they are indeed full of paradoxes; outside they are beautiful, seductive, charming, and loyal, but their insides are ugly, where they hold their battery packs that help us infuse them with our unconscious imagination. Those "magical icons" (5) also have a reflection of all of our body parts – heads, faces, legs, arms, and eyes. Exactly the right amount of anthropomorphism of this, in a way, "sort-of-person" (6), a perfect friend, as in the case of a number of other soft toys placed at the crossroads between human and animal, has pleased the multiple emotional needs of all generations.
The amorphic amalgam of shapes that these characters embody shows a tendency towards the taming, softening, and humanizing of animals that present a treat in the natural setting, by lending them human-like facial features. Being the fundamental element of human appearance, the face of a toy has an important role, because the central part of the interaction is established through the facial features of synthetic objects. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the face "has become a frozen structure in Western history and culture, perpetuating a cult of personality and setting up exclusionary zones between surface features and the depth of mind that lies behind these." (7) Present since the inception of the production and applications of computer technologies and interactive toys for the market, interface facial iconography has played an extremely important role in the process of interaction with the new technologies. This technique of the reterritorialization of the human face into various, among many other phenomena, virtual pets, represents, in a way, "a strategy for making computational technologies more user-friendly." (8)
All these modular shapes are also filled with bursting floods of colors. Rarely can one see such an intense flamboyance and exploding rainbow of colors as in cartoons and other habitats of characters for children. The late 1990s phenomenon that sprang up in relation to the Pokemon cartoon was indeed interesting, showing that the intensity of colors used in industry standards had reached its peak. More than 700 children as well as adults who watched the Pokemon cartoon in Japan, based on the Nintendo video game Pocket Monsters, ended up in the hospital due to seizures consisting of vomiting, fever, and eye irritation. After a while, experts summoned by a Japanese TV station discovered that the same scene provoked all of the seizures. Depicting the explosion of a bomb with whose task was to destroy a computer virus, the five seconds splash of light and dispersion of red particles right into the eyes of the little Pikachu, seemed to be very convincing and effective. The incident indeed led to research on so called TV epilepsy, or Photosensitive epilepsy, whose results show that one can be protected by either wearing darkened glasses, by radically taming the colors on the screen, or by using special covering filters.
Five plush toys from the Amjumix series inspired by the Amju characters are equipped with optical Theremins. While "watching" flamboyant, colorful scenes from their own world, they squeak, scream, and make electronic noise. The melting of various shapes into soft, lovable, and hyper-sweet, squeaker objects, or magical icons in Bailey's terms, continuously provides a portable, pocket-sized comfort in a twisted game of mirroring emotions. Amjumix embodies the underlying unconscious life or a "broken" code that creates constant blockages in the fluent flow of the game, in order to enable closer insight into the grotesque, oversized, and "cuteified" features of perfect virtual friends in their brightly-colored world.

References
(1) Rules of Cuteness, Cute Overload, http://www.cuteoverload.com/ (accesed 2.6.2008)
(2) Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p.114.
(3) Bruno Schulz, in Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p.115.
(4) Osip Mandelstam, in Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p.199.
(5) Lee Worth Bailey, The Enchantments of Technology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005) , p.176.
(6) John and Elisabeth Newson, in Deborah Jaffé, The History of Toys, From Spinning Tops to Robots (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 2006), p.149.
(7) Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture) (Hanover, London: Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, 2006) , p. 21.
(8) Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture) (Hanover, London: Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, 2006)., p.125.
(7) Greg Miller, Seizure filter, New Scientist. December 2001, issue 2320, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223202.900-seizure-filter.html (accesed 2.6.2008)

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Tanja Vujinović: AMJUMIX
Multimedijska instalacija, 2008
shockwave aplikacija, slajd projekcija, objekti z optičnimi senzorji, zvočna mešalka
Programiranje in zvok: Tanja Vujinović
Originalne računalniške igre (Amju Super Cool Pool, Amju Super Golf, Amju Pet Zoo, Amju) in originalni zvok © Jason Colman, www.amju.com
Elektronske komponente: Lenart Kranjc
Producent: Jan A. Kusej
Produkcija: Exstat, www.exstat.org

Opis projekta
Amjumix je omaž računalniškim igram Amju Jasona Colmana. Funkcionalen kot samostojna aplikacija, omogoča vmesnik Amjumix dostop do niza petih okolij, ki vsebujejo elemente, ki se občasno obnašajo nepredvidljivo in so odvisni od uporabnikovih gest. Skozi proces raziskovanja vsakega izmed disfunkcionalnih okolij, ustvarja v razvoju avdio-vizualnih vzorcev vsaka izmed gest dodatne napake, ki so vidne na zaslonu, in ki se dobesedno borijo za lastni obstoj. Občasno skrite elemente, ki omogočajo napredovanje na naslednji nivo igre, razkriva kurzor miške, spremenjen v simbol ure. V kolikor tranzitne elemente aktiviramo, nam ti omogočijo neskončno kroženje po nivojih aplikacije.

Drugi del Amjumixa sestavlja pet plišastih igrač, katerih forme so inspirirane z liki iz iger Amju. Igrače so postavljene v neposredno bližino izvora svetlobe, ki prihaja iz projeciranih podob izvornih iger in dodatnih napak, ki nastajajo v razvoju avdio-vizualnih vzorcev. Vsaka izmed igrač vsebuje optični senzor, ki se odziva na svetlobo v okolju in močno reagira na intenziteto barv in svetlobe podob na zaslonu, spreminjajoč omenjene vrednosti v elektronski procesirani zvočni hrup.