rick / bluebox

Blue Balls
by Rick Bradley, July 2007

Introduction
------------

This is an interactive art piece which shows video with generated text "poetry"
subtitles, as well as playing audio (spoken word or music).  It responds to the
presence of users, playing different media.  This is an evolution of the work
"black box" by the same artist, in collaboration with Sean Jewett.

Installation
------------

 * See support/ for ubuntu-kernel (kernel version) and dpkg --get-selection
 output
 * if running audio components as a non-root user, user must be in group 'audio'
 * I have used runlevel 3 (default is normally 2).  I create an /etc/inittab
 file (example can be found in support/).  I remove the gdm startup link from
 /etc/rc3.d/
 * video uses mplayer running on the framebuffer instead of running X windows.
 For this I have chosen an ATI Radeon card (lspci output:) 
   01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R350 [Radeon 9800] (Secondary)

Media Sources
-------------

 * video:  the prelinger archive
 * text:  project gutenberg etexts
 * audio: silver-burdett filmstrip cassettes, various "art" mp3s, 4-cd
 collection of spoken word poetry