IDEA 20090125 PlayDrive

I already wrote the code and basically had the idea ages ago with my friend Mark Hellar, to create an event where people play their hard drives. What is more interesting than

The script is quite simple and I originally created it for Fang Lu's video installation at Gray Area Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Here's the code: svn+ssh://www.rejon.org/home/rejon/svn/bin/trunk/playdoh

PLAY_STAMP=`date +%F:%H:%S` PLAY_DIRS= LOGFILE=playdoh-$PLAY_STAMP.log PLAYLIST=playdoh-$PLAY_STAMP.playlist

if [ "$1" != "" ] then : PLAY_DIRS="$1" else : PLAY_DIRS=`pwd` fi

find "$PLAY_DIRS" -name "*.avi" -o -name "*.mpg" | uniq | sort -R 2>&1 | tee $PLAYLIST | xargs mplayer -fs 2>&1 | tee $LOGFILE

This overall will search your drive and then play the files fullscreen one after the other, randomly. There are a load of events one could do with this script and concept. Another idea is to have a wifi access point in a space that has a screen one must click to be able to use WIFI. On this splash page would be scripts to activate a shared drive on one's computer during the event. Then another computer could scour computers on the network server and playback people's hard drives.

The other way, is for people to put files onto memory sticks, and we could have a few USB hubs with all the sticks plugged in, then run/modify the script above to play all the files.