Bonprix
Interactive installation with Niklas Roy
Eniarof N°32, Marseille / 2022
Bonprix is a shopping experience in the form of a game, where the player has to operate a supermarket self-checkout machine as fast as they can. Bonprix was made for Eniarof N°32, a DIY fun fair founded by Antonin Fourneau. This edition of Eniarof was organised with a big group of artists around May 1st 2022 under the theme “Laborious Games”. The event took place in Marseille, France, at Les 8 Pillards, a former factory for industrial burners turned into a wonderful art space.
Relating to the theme of work and play, Bonprix addresses consumption as contemporary work, where the whole process of buying is outsourced to the consumer. During the corona pandemic many self-checkout machines appeared in our local supermarkets and we have used them a lot. So we thought to built such a machine ourselves. The machine has a display, which shows the product that the player has to scan with a barcode reader. The products range from a dried out baguette to expensive sunglasses. The more you scan, the more points you get – if you are slow, you start to get discount every two seconds. When the 90 seconds time limit is over, Bonprix prints you a receipt with the score in Euros.
At the heart of the machine is an old laptop running Linux along with a USB barcode scanner. The barcodes for the products were created with an online generator and the laptop reads them in the same way as keystrokes. To initiate the game, players press a “Start” button, which is read by an Arduino microcontroller board connected to the laptop. The thermal receipt printer, which we generously received from our dear Eniarof fellow Guillaume, was also connected via USB to the laptop. The main program of Bonprix was written in Javascript and ran on Firefox.
Read more on Niklas’ website and see also previous Eniarofs in Costa Rica and Mexico and Tunisia.
In summer 2023 we did a remake of Bonprix at our exhibition called Under Construction in Le Pavillon, Namur, Belgium. This version of the installation was called Promo Bricolage and it was a hardware store self-checkout. Please see some photos in Niklas’ diary.
Big thanks to Antonin and Thomas for organising this event as well as to all Eniarofers for their supercool games and warm welcome at Les 8 Pillards. Special thanks to Guillaume for the neat little printer and for our excellent cooks who surprised us daily with culinary creations. We had great time in Marseille and look forward to returning!
Bonprix is a shopping experience in the form of a game, where the player has to operate a supermarket self-checkout machine as fast as they can. Bonprix was made for Eniarof N°32, a DIY fun fair founded by Antonin Fourneau. This edition of Eniarof was organised with a big group of artists around May 1st 2022 under the theme “Laborious Games”. The event took place in Marseille, France, at Les 8 Pillards, a former factory for industrial burners turned into a wonderful art space.
Relating to the theme of work and play, Bonprix addresses consumption as contemporary work, where the whole process of buying is outsourced to the consumer. During the corona pandemic many self-checkout machines appeared in our local supermarkets and we have used them a lot. So we thought to built such a machine ourselves. The machine has a display, which shows the product that the player has to scan with a barcode reader. The products range from a dried out baguette to expensive sunglasses. The more you scan, the more points you get – if you are slow, you start to get discount every two seconds. When the 90 seconds time limit is over, Bonprix prints you a receipt with the score in Euros.
At the heart of the machine is an old laptop running Linux along with a USB barcode scanner. The barcodes for the products were created with an online generator and the laptop reads them in the same way as keystrokes. To initiate the game, players press a “Start” button, which is read by an Arduino microcontroller board connected to the laptop. The thermal receipt printer, which we generously received from our dear Eniarof fellow Guillaume, was also connected via USB to the laptop. The main program of Bonprix was written in Javascript and ran on Firefox.
Read more on Niklas’ website and see also previous Eniarofs in Costa Rica and Mexico and Tunisia.
In summer 2023 we did a remake of Bonprix at our exhibition called Under Construction in Le Pavillon, Namur, Belgium. This version of the installation was called Promo Bricolage and it was a hardware store self-checkout. Please see some photos in Niklas’ diary.
Big thanks to Antonin and Thomas for organising this event as well as to all Eniarofers for their supercool games and warm welcome at Les 8 Pillards. Special thanks to Guillaume for the neat little printer and for our excellent cooks who surprised us daily with culinary creations. We had great time in Marseille and look forward to returning!
