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.

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.

DESCRIPTION

Fish need hard drive is a self-reflective piece that speaks about our dependence on technology.

CONCEPT

Six tropical zebrafish were put in an aquarium where the heater was substituted with a plastic case that contained a hard drive. I then turned my computer into a server and made the hard drive host a website that documented the evolution of the fish. If the fish were entertaining enough to get visitors on the website, the hard drive would be solicited often and provide the head needed to keep them alive. This metaphor of the “self-made fish” highlights the dependence on the optical cables that are present in all of our homes.

Unfortunately, my lack of zoological skills combined with a poor promotional plan did not yield the expected results, and most of the fish perished.

TECHNOLOGY

Large aquarium, zebrafish, old hard drive and custom case, tubes, Apache server, PHP, mySql.

DESCRIPTION

Findthegat.com is an online interactive data visualization program that rakes and organizes information from the Web to allow users to compare, analyze and interpret these sets of data. The content accessed relates to hip-hop music and its multiple social, political and geographical references.

CONCEPT

Specifically, the website queries Freebase for data that is tagged with either the words “hip-hop” or “rap”, and then searches for corresponding album covers. When this second search is finished, a modifiable mosaïc of all the information is made available through a flash animation. The layout is available in 3 different modes, called “gat mode”, “coffin mode” and “spit mode”, which offer different types of visualization.

TECHNOLOGY

This project uses PHP, XML, JSON and Flash.

PUBLICATION

All technical details and documentation are available on FindTheGat.com

DESCRIPTION

Guardians of the world is a 16×14 feet mashup of several mapped areas around the world that I retraced and integrated together

CONCEPT

This project included the San Francisco Bay Area, NYC subway, geological map of Brazil, Vienna tramway system, Princeton campus, downtown London, etc. The result is a low-tech, low-cost disposable map that can be disposed of and reprinted/re-assembled very easily.

This piece also reminds the viewer of the variety of viewpoints from which urban planning, human development and natural conservation are approached by different cultures. The tight integration of all parts of the map in a single print is an attempt at collapsing space and puts forth a fantasist 2D representation of actual physical spaces.

Finally, Guardians of the world is an overexaggeration of a physical object that is rapidly dissapearing, thanks to the advent of general technology, GPS locating systems and satellites.

TECHNOLOGY

About 160 sheets of letter-sized paper, one roll of tape and a cheap printer. The rest was done with Illustrator and Posterizer.

DESCRIPTION

The Suburban Twins series is a personal comment on my experience living in a suburb, which has been most of my life. It consists of 22”x30” and 44”x44” digital prints in black in white.

CONCEPT

When looked at from up close, one can see nothing but lines with minor variations, but by stepping back gradually, images start to appear among the horizontal lines. In Twins I, the images shown are a washer and dryer, representing the automation of mundane everyday life activities, and the Twins II reveal two cars next each other parked under temporary shelters. These “tempo shelters” are to me the ultimate symbol of suburbia, underlining the dependency we have created to the automobile by living in what James Howard Kunstler calls a “Technosis Externality Clusterfuck”. The black and white lines are very clearly reminiscent of alienating prison bars, and remind the pragmatic repetition of suburban planning.

Suburban twins is also a physical experience. By staring at the prints from close up, the lines of the image start to shift, colors start appearing and the whole print moves in strange, static way. This phenomenon is due to the fact that our brain is having a hard time interpreting such a load of symmetric black and white lines causing cold colors to lie on the edge of the white borders, and warm colors on the edge of the black borders. The experience is different for every person looking at the prints, and is a reminder that our eyes were not designed to look at something like this.

TECHNOLOGY

Large-format printing, archival paper.

DESCRIPTION

“Since only the manner of expression and not the representation has to express this general idea, I have not given any title.”

- Folkert & Atley

Video piece. Total length: 9:13.
Music by Godspeed! You Black Emperor

VIEW IT HERE