Panoptic Machine Controller

The Panoptic Machine is an interactive installation by mathematician Zsuzsa Weiner and my dad, shown at the Madách 200 Thought Festival in October 2023. Inspired by Borges' Library of Babel, it lets you travel through every possible image on a 128 × 72 pixel grid with 1,000 colors — a timeline of all images that is not infinite, just unimaginably long. Somewhere on it is the date of your birth, a supernova, tomorrow's dust drifting past a window — all just minutes of scrolling away, and impossible to find in the noise. I built the controller for the exhibit: a red sphere that moves the machine along this number line. Rolling it left and right steps backward and forward through the images; rolling it up and down zooms the step size, from changing a single pixel's color to leaping across vast stretches of noise. www.somlai-fischer.com/adam/art/panoptic-machine