GMU:Human and Nonhuman Performances II SS16/Kan Feng

Introduction

"Analogter" is an interactive and automatic calculation machine which simulates the interface and logic of abacus, and above all, enlarges the analog process of abacus to calculate the amounts of visitors in a performative form.

In this project, I want to design a interactive installation based on the algorithm of Chinese Modern Abacus, which has one bead on each rod in the upper deck and four beads each in the bottom for decimal computation.

What is abacus

The abacus is at once one of the oldest, most enduring, and efficient products of the human mind. It appeared early before arabic numbers, so it doesn’t have a sense of numbers. abacus does the calculation according to the different beads and the position of them to represent different numbers. The upper bead represents 5 and each bead below the horizontal beam represents 1. And the beads are considered to be calculated when they move close to the horizontal beam.

Compared to nowadays calculation technology operated by simple click by button, abacus enlarges the process of calculation in an analog way. We can draw the graph below when take the position between the beads and horizontal beam as Y axis, the number it presents as X axis. As a calculation process which needs to be well trained and once defined abacus as a efficient tool, nowadays literally causes hardly use of abacus.

Where does media die

Technology lets us have efficiency and accuracy without work being performed by the user. But it is too optimistic to overview what technologies have done until now. We should consider what representational characteristic practices are still used and apply to brand new artifacts that satisfy many of users. In the case of the abacus, we needed to work on encodding and decoding to get the result as possible, yet remediated forms of calculations may no longer have an encoding and decoding process.