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.

DESCRIPTION

iamclean.org is a deodorant docking station that talks with the Web in real-time, and a website that lets the public visualize this data.

CONCEPT

iamclean.org is a critique of social networking sites and devices. Since the Web 2.0’s immense development, it seems like the emergence of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and MSN Live appears unstoppable, and people are definitely tuning in to make the most of the interactive awesomeness.

This docking station sits in my room, and every time I take the deodorant out of it, the status LED goes on, and the installation knows I’m applying deodorant. At the back of the installation, there is an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, which lets me to plug it into any router or internet source. This allows the information to be sent out to my website instantly, where a live visualisation makes it available for the whole world to see which days I have put deodorant on, and for how many seconds. You can also search for a certain date, and reorganize the days as you please. The station can also be either AC-powered or battery-powered with four standard AA batteries.

TECHNOLOGY

This was made using a combination of an arduino, an xPort, PHP, mySql, and flash (for the visualization). All technical details and other media can be found at iamclean.org.

PUBLICATION

The iamclean.org project was published in MAKE magazine 14 (2008), appeared on the BoingBoing gadgets blog and was featured on many technology and digital arts websites.

DESCRIPTION

EASE is a spatial discomfort simulator. It takes place in a black room where sound volume is controlled by the position of the people blindly navigating the space.

CONCEPT

This room also has wall-mounted speakers playing Brian Eno’s Music for Airports at low volume (to put one at ease). People who walk in the room must wear special infrared-emmiting devices on one of their feet. This IR signal is picked up and computed as a position. When two or more people get closer to one another, the volume of the music raises, alerting them that they might collide with one another if they keep their direction. This way, people in the room are aware of the other’s positions in relation to them, but must rely on the music to do so.

EASE refers to the disorientation caused by the amputation of a human sense, as well as the ease-in/ease-out movement expected by people who walk towards one another, slow down, and then walk back in fear of colliding with someone else. It addresses the possibility of not being able to rely on our sight to position ourselves in a given space, the augmented sensitivity of other senses when one of them is amputated and the notion of public (shared with multiple users) and private space (intimate because of the darkness).

TECHNOLOGY

Infrared emitters, webcams and lot of glue. Video tracking was coded from scratch in Processing. The first image of this documentation is a screenshot of the users from a 2D bird’s eye perspective.

PUBLICATION

EASE was showcased for 2 weeks in the EV building at Concordia, in Montreal.