AlJazari HomePage PageList
[This project now has an official front page here: http://www.pawfal.org/al-jazari ]

Al-Jazari was an influential scholar and engineer who lived at the beginning of the 13th century.

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"Al-Jazari's machine was originally a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. It had two drummers, a harpist and a flautist."

"The heart of the mechanism is a rotating cylindrical beam with pegs (cams) protruding from it. These just bump into little levers that operate the percussion. The point of the model is to demonstrate that the drummer can be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs are moved around. In other words it is a programmable drum machine."

""Whether or not al-Jazari dynamically programmed his machines is an intriguing question", he says, "it is quite likely that he used this method, at the very least, for fine tuning the rhythm of the musicians"."

http://www.shef.ac.uk/marcoms/eview/articles58/robot.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jazari
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2005/refresh/docs/conferences/Gunalan_Nadarajan.pdf

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http://www.runme.org/project/+aljazari/
DerivativeWorkFromAlJazariVideo

Al-Jazari continues in the gamepad driven vein of BetaBlocker, and is written in Scheme for fluxus (see FluxusPage). Only for use at royal drinking parties.

Textures, meshes and full source code can be found here: http://www.pawfal.org/flotsam/al-jazari/

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Further work:

No Copy Paste (http://ncp.kibu.hu) developed their own al jazari based performance. Video here: http://vimeo.com/1691667

Al Jazari installation
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http://www.pawfal.org/flotsam/al-jazari-inst/

You need some coloured gamepads for the full effect:
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License