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…

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

“What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps.”

I really love these patterns, they almost look like they were printed on a nice textured yellow paper.
Go check out his website, here and the pattern gallery here. It’s really worth it.

Voltage from Bam Studio on Vimeo.

Just like modular synthesizers, people connect with each other in order to achieve diverse objectives. In Voltage, robots, half-human and half-synthesizer, powered by a huge amount of energy, connect to each other in an electric and chaotic trance.

If you can read french, a great little book that made me laugh a lot – most of the time by its overexagerrated cynical dialogues.

La première fois que je me vis dans un miroir, je ris : je ne croyais pas que c’était moi. A présent, quand je regarde mon reflet, je ris : je sais que c’est moi. Et tant de hideur a quelque chose de drôle. ” Epiphane Otos serait-il condamné par sa laideur à vivre exclu de la société des hommes et interdit d’amour ? Devenu la star – paradoxale – d’une agence de top models, Epiphane sera tour à tour martyr et bourreau, ambassadeur de la monstruosité internationale… et amoureux de la divine Ethel, une jeune comédienne émue par sa hideur. Sur un thème éternel, la romancière d’Hygiène de l’assassin et des Catilinaires nous offre un conte cruel et drôle, à la fois distancié et tendre