DESCRIPTION

Trying to decipher the new and the old in a perspective of instantaneous short messages, WHATisWHAT sifts and harvests Twitter.com for blurbs that contain the terms ‘is the new’. The result is an infinitely-growing web of tags and associations linking new things to their now-obsolete equivalents.

CONCEPT

Social media has become the platform of choice for sharing our experiences, and networked objects such as smart phones and portable netbooks are leading the way in providing the hardware and software to let us easily do so. The first aim of the project was to build a map of collective intelligence based on the empirical data sent in the form of tweets to observe changing trends and ideals of the digitally connected. As data grew over time, it also became a great way of visualizing serendipitous associations and interesting conceptual leaps created by different people that do not know each other. A recurring critique of Twitter’s concept is its lack of substance and context due to the short length of messages. WHATisWHAT is trying to be the glue for all these disconnected ideas and provide some context to help frame the data it collects.

TECHNICAL

PHP, Javascript (ajax) and Twitter API

PUBLICATION

Project done as an assignment during the months of february and march to support my application to the Piet Zwart Institute – Willem de Kooning Academy at Rotterdam University for the masters in Media design and Communication : Networked media.

DESCRIPTION

Doubting.us is a web-based introspective narrative documenting my travels and experiences in a time of transition. I have taken important decisions about many things recently, and many more are to come – this Website is a repository of dichotomous text/image snapshots of the experiences stemming from these decisions

CONCEPT

The main premise on which this project was built is the lack of certitude and assurance we all feel at different moments in our lives. I view this uncertainty in a very positive way, allowing us to consider different perspectives at these precise moments of doubt. As I believe not many things stand for very long, I have chosen text and images that are connected at different degrees, leaving a lot of room for interpretation and abstraction. The same way our decisions can sometimes lead us in strange and unexpected paths, the images are all taken on the spur of the moment with my low-quality cell phone camera, creating distorted narratives that barely brush the surface of reality.

TECHNICAL

PHP, Javascript and Mootools

PUBLICATION

Project is currently featured on the Design and Computation Arts home page of Concordia University.

Today I did something I have wanted to do in a long time : scan my almost-full moleskine notebook. I’ve used it at least a little bit every day or two for the past few years, mostly for university or work-related note-taking. I haven’t put the whole thing up there (43 images, 86 pages) but you still get a good idea of the apparent havoc going on in my mind. Looking back at these images (some of them are old, almost 3 years!) I realized that someone who could decipher the words and understand the meaning of all the graphs and doodles would surely end up knowing me just as well as my oldest friends – there’s probably more info in there than in my passport, resume and wallet combined.

http://laurierrochon.com/moleskine

Just after the museum…
[ Judd's piece of stainless steel + plexiglass was right across from Jenny Holzer's LED show ]

Jenny Holzer is just great and she has some stuff at the Chicago MCA right now – the displays I found were a bit out of context but nonetheless satisfying. I get closer with the cam after a few seconds…

I’ve decided to put up all the code for my doubting.us project – it uses MooSizer to scale the images, JS, CSS, PHP and HTML for the rest. I decided to strip down the functionality so it could be easily shareable and easily updated. I had everything in a database but moved it into a PHP file instead, so there is no need to setup mySql, etc.

DOWNLOAD THE FILES HERE

Installing Doubting.us

1) Download the ZIP archive
2) Upload to your Web server, and that’s it!

How to add pictures

1) Open functions.php and add a new line to the array found at the top of the doc. Here’s the syntax to follow, don’t forget the comma at the end there :
array(”name_of_your_image.jpg”,”Descriptive text”,”Slide label”,”Permalink_parameter_use_a_number_here”),
2) upload the “name_of_your_images.jpg” image in the images folder, and you’re done.

How to delete pictures

Basically just undo what you did in the last step, although deleting the image in your “images” folder in not necessary. You can take out pretty much any line in that functions.php file, just make sure the code respects the syntax described earlier once you’re done.

Doubting.us

A picture and some text for every doubt. This is a bit of my visual blog, I’ll be posting to it and feeding into this site once in a while.
Everything on http://www.doubting.us

“Free allows you to work on YOUR terms. Not your client’s. You can say, “I can do it for free, but under these conditions”. As soon as money is involved, they feel like they own you.”

- The Gorilla

Growing plants in e-waste 2009

DESCRIPTION

Digital ecology is the documentation (website and book) of a garden growing in defunct computer parts.

CONCEPT

This project takes aim at raising the issue of e-waste and how to deal with the “technologization” of our society. I wanted to explore what it meant to be among the technology leaders of the world, and having to dispose of hardware that becomes obsolete in a very short amount of time.

I went to a used computer store in Montreal and acquired old hardware components that were destined to be thrown away. I brought them home, took them apart, filled the different pieces with soil and put various plant and flower seeds in them. In the weeks that followed, I looked after them and documented the growing process, transforming “e-waste” in a receptacle for new life. The result was a book, printed and bound.

TECHNOLOGY

Old, dirty computer peripherals, soil, seeds, paper, ink and book binding materials.

PUBLICATION

Growing plants and e-waste was part of the Exposed 09′ – The Social Body show at Art-Mûr gallery in Montreal. The complete artist statement, picture gallery and book images are available on my website page.