Paper Machine
(Carbon Sampler 1.0)

About the work

‘Carbon Sampler 1.0’ is a collection of four works by the Lycette Bros made in the 1990s. Created to showcase their work, the title reflects a period when John and Mark Lycette officially began collaborating and called their company ‘Carbon’. ‘Carbon Sampler 1.0’ reflects the brothers early claim that their work is situated ‘somewhere between art and design’. The CD-ROM features the interactive work ‘papermachine’ (1996) made collectively as Lycette Bros and 'boxcraft’ (1996), a 1-bit interactive aircraft builder made by Mark while working at Nofrontiere in Vienna as well as the linear animations ‘Autograph’ (Mark Lycette, 1995) and ‘Not my Type’ (John Lycette, 1995).

‘papermachine’ began, John explains,

in response to a commission to produce an interactive work to be distributed via a floppy disk (2.4MB!) affixed to “Multimedia Magazine” (published in Melbourne). Mark and I began developing the concept and some visuals – and it was to be a sort of homage to paper. But before we got very far into the process, the magazine came to an end and the project stalled. Sometime later while Mark was working at (the design agency) Nofrontiere in Vienna and I was reaching the end of the contract in my first full-time job at Empire Ridge [a Melbourne business that started up to exploit the potential of home printing in 1987], I started it up again as a self-promotional piece (c.1995)”. ‘papermachine’ functions as an interactive puzzle, where triangular puzzle pieces must be uncovered by exploring and interacting with various elements on the screen. It was made with Macromedia Director and not being a programmer - it took me a long time and many late nights to make it work (on my very small Mac LC475). When it was finished, I packaged them up and distributed them by hand and post. I entered it into several competitions in Europe and the US and it most notably won an award in Communication Arts magazine and was subsequently published on a CD compilation issue. It also won an ATOM award in Melbourne.

The CD-Rom was the easiest way to get an audience for our content - they were large capacity, fast and reliable and could run on most computers of the time. Boxcraft was actually designed to run online using the Macromedia Shockwave plug-in, but the World Wide Web was very slow in those days and the uptake of plug-ins could not be depended upon. The process of ‘burning’ a CD took about an hour and the blank discs were quite cheap. The published “sampler” was robust, reliable, cheap and easy to distribute via hand or post. In 1999 we exhibited the Carbon Sampler at the Cannes Multimedia Festival (MILIA) and distributed most of the promotional CD-Roms.

A year or so later Macromedia Flash came out, and the production of online interactive content became much more realistic. So much so that in 2001, I reproduced ‘Not My Type’ entirely (going from raster to vector content) in order to once again increase its potential audience. The ‘Not My Type’ series of web animations went on to be one of our most widely recognised and successful productions (2024).

References