Office Job Pop-Up Computer

Notifications on your devices can be annoying today, but one might argue that pop-up computing annoyance peaked somewhere around the year 2000. At the time, ad pop-ups on the web were prolific, while system popups – reminding you that you improperly ejected floppy disk A: and the like – could indicate more serious problems.

If you’d like to relive these good(?) times from computing’s heyday(?), then the Office Job installation by Felix Fisgus, Thomas Molles, and Pierre Blanchard could be just the thing. Created for the ENIAROF art festival in Marseille, this project features a roughly refrigerator-sized compute along with a go-kart-sized mouse as a user interface. When the “operating system” starts, pop-up notifications appear on the screen, and you – typically with the help of a partner – have to push the mouse around and click the button to quell these errors. If you're not fast enough, the game ends with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.

Inside the computer, a Raspberry Pi runs a Processing script to produce the visual pop-ups and play notification sounds. A roughly 40-inch plasma screen is turned at 90º as the monitor, and blocked off with a cardboard bezel to better resemble the portrait format of old computer screens.

The mouse rolls around on casters with a pallet base, and an optical sensor for an actual mouse is used for tracking. An adjustable lens changes the focal length for this unique setup, while LEDs provide illumination for the sensor. An ESP32 allows the cardboard device to act like a normal wireless mouse, with the help of this library. As a final touch, a large rope connects the mouse to the computer, though it's simply for looks, not actual data transfer.