Give an Arduino, a handful of servos and motors to an artist and what do you get? This installation by visual artist Irena Kukric in collaboration with Canny Sutanto is one answer. The installation called Happy Days, is inspired by the Samuel Beckett play of the same name. The five-minute play consists of a sequence of movements and sounds controlled by an Arduino Mega and using the VVVV live programming environment to sequence the narrative.

To quote from their presentation: "What is great about VVVV and Arduino is that there is the Firmata library that enables you to work with both platforms in conjunction so even artists and designers with lower level coding skills are able to go from concept to realization quite easy. We used Arduino Mega which was very convenient considering the number of motors and the pins that Mega has to offer. After we had our final order of cables and pins, we even made our own shield for it".



The play was staged without human actors or conventional (verbal) dialogue as performing a ritual in the play overshadows the performer, the object of the ritual can survive on its own. Therefore, they used these objects or rather props from the play and made them actors, animating them with motors, as you can see in the video.