For David-James Fernandes' short film, Re-Wire, I created a believable, patched-together Frankenstein of a computer – and its interface – for Dr. Vanuz's mind-altering laboratory.
I began with a trip to ReBOOT, a local used-computer charity. We made off with several Pentium 4 towers, a decades-old Compaq server rack, and a few hundred kilos' worth of UPSes and hard drive arrays.
I went to work hacking away at one of the PCs, installing Ubuntu Linux and replacing its default user interface with XMonad, a tiled window manager written in Haskell. I enlisted Matt Corks' expertise with zsh shellscripting and configured dzen, a Linux-based widget engine. All of this was wrapped up into one master script so that the actor would actually be able to type in the command himself, hit enter, and have the imagery appear in real-time.
Alex Steacy contributed a graphical interface that was also controlled by the actor, Shawn Lawrence. My TagTool Mini also makes a cameo appearance.
Re-Wire was part of the 2010 Cannes Short Film Corner and was screened at numerous festivals.
Hacking together an XMonad config and testing.
Video of interface in progress.
A still from Re-Wire showing the actor interacting with the interface.
