Abstract
A penny for God is a small scale interactive installation. It is based on a TV and a slot maschine as input medias. The user can move the antennas to influence the “channel picture” or use the remote control to zap through the channels. The piece is about religion, media, manipulation, recipients, random, life, interpretation, children of the goggle box and images.
The installation is meant as a tool to find the true religion or most fitting religion for the user. Seems strange, yeah it is!

The whole story
How does it work ?
The user pulls the one-handed bandit (slot maschine) and this is the start of the religious journey. The game has begun. The slot maschine starts and randomly the different slots come to a stop. When a slot stops the installation grabs the image which is currently displayed from the TV. After all slots are filled with TV pictures the user can combine them, he chooses if he wants to add or substract the images (color addtion or subraction). After this he gets a result image which is then compared to iconographics which symbolise the world religions (Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, …). The computer calculates how much percent are identical with the user’s generateted picture and the different iconographics and tells him which is the best religion for him because of the result.
Parallel to this user mode the computer searches for himself the true religion, respectively it’s religious identity. It grabs every “dead channel picture”, the picture which consist of black and white snow and compares it to the iconographics and calculates the best fitting. Because a computer’s mind is out of 1 and 0, which means black and white. This search can be compared to projects like SETI (Search for extra terrestrian intelligence), because the dead channel picture is a noise which isn’t generated by humans, so it must be GOD ?
The idea is that GOD if he exists is everywhere and why shouldn’t he be in electromagnetical waves which are visualized on a TV. The possibility exists that the dead channel picture or the pictures generate by the user leads to recognizeable pictures, for instance in a picture of Jesus or Buddha, but the chance is very low, but you never can know. This work tries to be critic in a very abstract and scuril way. It asks questions about the media how it influences us, about religion, about the interconnections and about life and random as it’s main power.
I don’t want to explain the whole concept in detail I want the piece to be interpreted by the user, this is not a tech-show-off piece, it’s more a traditional art work, and therefore should be experienced in a traditional way.
This piece has developped out of my conceptual studies about religion and media. Which to my mind has been interesting before the D-Day (11. Sept) and now it could be an even more interesting topic.
The installation is quite finished in terms of programming, the slot maschine is the next part which I will build, and then it’s done.

Technical description
What this piece is technically about: A slot maschine which I am currently building, a TV and a computer with a frame grabber card. The space I need for this piece can be quite tiny, I mean it’s just a TV a computer and a slot maschine 5-9 m² should be okay.