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.

Will be part of this show…

EXPOSED’09: THE SOCIAL BODY
May 12-23, 2009
Vernissage: Thursday, May 14, 5-8 PM
Art Mûr – Espace 4, 5826 St-Hubert
(métro Rosemont), Montreal
HTTP://EXPOSED.CONCORDIA.CA

Exposed’09: The Social Body explores the possibilities in which new
artistic trends in digital media technology have transformed our conception
of humans as social entities. The exhibition expands on the consequences of
being social in a time where interconnected networks modulate our
lifestyles. Exhibited works cross the range of computer-based medias,
including interactive installations, responsive environments, wearable
systems, sculpture and screen-based interactive projects.

(Everything taken from www.laurierrochon.com/plants)

On March 22nd 2009, 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. It can also be downloaded in low-res (see link atop the page).

We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. 

- E. Burtynsky

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. This class was called “imagined futures”, and I tried to capture what was left behind when a society pushed forward, in the name of progress and evolution. 

My research findings have revealed that it is very hard for individuals in Canada to get rid of a personal computer – since they are extremely complex and cannot be taken apart by machines, yet way too toxic to be simply trashed. Given this, industrialized countries usually have to 1) ship them out to a third-world country, where poor people will melt them by hand and separate the pieces to their health’s expense or 2) deal with the pollution caused by all the toxic metals (ex: led) comprised in the computers, hoping nobody will discover what they have done. 

Needless to say this is a very important issue we will have to consider if we keep, as a society, striving for technological progress and we decide this is something important for us. I think a great illustration of this situation is the SchoolNet program initiated and successfully completed at the beginning of this decade by the Federal Government. Schools with internet connections and computers were wired up across Canada, allowing for unprecedented access to information; but today these computers are aging, and will need to be replaced very soon, all 500 000 of them.

Will the Government spend millions of dollars to hire people here in Canada and get them torn apart locally? Save on the labor costs and get third-world country children to do it for us? Use Russian techniques and dump everything beneath the north pole?

I think this is very important to think about, and I cannot understand how there is still no surtax to cover the cost of unmounting computers (especially that they are extremely cheap now), that we have no proper recycling system in place, and not much of a discussion going on in our society about this problem.

Little update on my plants-growing-out-of-keyboards project for my CART class.
Even if we had some crappy weather the last week, the plants are receiving A-1 care and doing great. This week was especially exciting as many new keyboards started having some new green stuff coming out of it. I still have about a week before I have to make the book about them.

So here are a few pictures from tonight’s presentation of my final project : a 14×12 (feet) map mashup of several maps put together (including San Francisco Bay Area, NYC subway, geological map of Brazil, Vienna tramway system, Princeton campus, London, etc.). It is composed of 140 sheets of 8.5×11 + all the tape needed to hold it. Some of the key concepts :

- collapse of space
- urban planning
- visual representation
- pixels vs vectors 
- depiction of a map as a cheap, low-tech object
- portability

I’ve worked hard on my new CART project this weekend, which consists mainly to get small plants, grass, veggies and other stuff growing from emptied keyboard and mouse cases. While running around town to find some old hardware, I realized that even stores had a hard time getting rid of their obsolete stuff – even getting everything reshipped to China seemed pretty expensive, and there aren’t tons of organizations that take them in for recycling. I’m going to try to make this a central concern in the project, hopefully I can draw some inspiration from Manufactured Landscapes…

Other small thing, I DONT KNOW what people do with their keyboards or where they put them, but taking them apart was very disgusting, in many cases. Hopefully this will transform into a positive element that will be reflected in the plants that arise from them! Pictures…

I’ll be doing a project on mapping this upcoming weeks, here are some fun images I found that related to the subject while browsing on ffffound.com

EDIT

So here is the actual 4-color CMYK printed…I’m quite happy with the results, although the purple didn’t quite come together as expected – my CYAN was a little dark.

Supposed to be a self-portrait of sorts.
I’ve found myself eating everything with a spoon lately, including pasta and salad…

22×30, 4 colors.

Here is a little text I had quickly put together for one of my previous classes, I adapted it to fit this entry a little bit.

While I understand that Facebook is an extremely important tool that we all use, social phenomena none of us can escape and excellent example to illustrate many concepts shown in class, I feel like the discussions  generated by the students is completely useless in our understanding of media, technology and how it actually changes us as humans. Here is my explanation.

Technology in the broad sense of the term is always twofold: it has a medium (many people like to call this the container), and content (the substance). This is true for many things in life (think of a gift – box and present, packsack – the actual bag and its content, a webpage – the frame is it built with and the content separated from it and perhaps even humans – body and soul). When we think of technology (not just digital – a book, a hammer, a car can all be considered technologies – basically any scientific advance that is supposed to benefit humanity) the duality of its nature is always present, and this is even more critical when we deal with media. Let’s not forget that media includes text and images, but also audio, video and more. By defining media as I just did, Facebook as a digital technology would be considered as media, since it is comprised not only of text and images, but also video and audio.

The separation between the medium and the content is crucial here, but which is which? As the media theorist Marshall Mcluhan put it, the content of a medium is usually a new medium that also has its own content. To make this simpler, let’s take the example of the television. The television itself is a medium, and its content could be the MuchMusic channel, for example. The MuchMusic channel is a medium, and its content would be music video clips. These clips are in themselves a medium, who in turn have an idea as their content (could be other things, depending on the intention). If we transpose this to Facebook and go back up the chain, the Internet is the medium and allows for various contents such as telecommunications, games, email, file sharing as well as web pages. This is the category Facebook fits in.

Facebook defined as content made possible by the internet is merely a tool for its users, in the same way that YouTube is, or the way that MuchMusic is content, or a tool (passive one) for the medium that television is. When McLuhan was talking about the separation between the content and the medium and its effect on people and society, he claimed that the “The medium is the message”. The actual message than any media holds is the medium itself, not its content. The message, which is the important transformations that result from the medium that will affect us, is not what is shown on TV, but the fact that the TV itself exists. If we take the example of the car, the message that it has to offer is not the fact that we can, as individuals, easily go from point A to point B in a rapid way, but rather the fact that this technology is responsible for creation of roads, suburbs and new ways to conceptualize urban development. As for the TV, it doesn’t really matter what is actually playing on it – what’s important is the fact that we have it, that it changes the relationship that we have with other humans, with institutions, with our direct families, our environment, the way we access information…the list goes on and on. The impact of the the TV’s existence is what matters, because it is what changes our world, not American Idol, The Simpsons or a hockey game. These instances are content, and will be swapped as soon as the context changes. The TV stays, and changes the context.

Taken from the Wikipedia entry for ‘the medium is the message’, Mcluhan has been known to say that “people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. Specific content might have little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children’s shows or violent programming, to give one example — the effect of television on society would be identical, and profound.”

Facebook is content. The same way that Windows or Firefox or Blogger or Twitter or Google or Photoshop or MSN are content. They will eventually be replaced, because the medium will be in a new context, and the medium will have a new message. Even if many think Google will stay eternal, I am completely certain it will disappear the same way science as we know it constantly disappears to leave room for new discoveries, new concepts, new messages. I remember the time when ICQ was the king of the internet (of chatting anyways), and we never thought it would go away. We have barely started to develop the internet yet, I can’t imagine how much transformation it will undergo in the next 10, 20, 50 years to come.

Telling our personal stories about Facebook is very entertaining for all of us, yet is it extremely alienating in the sense where there is nothing but subjective matter and because it is a personal experience, it closes off all discussion or possible debate. Comparing anecdotes or the amount of friends we have is fun, but not getting us anywhere. If we want to understand how media, mediums and technology actually affect people and society as a whole, we have to be a bit more ambitious in our discussions. Our brain is extremely malleable and the internet is completely reprogramming the way we think as individuals, groups and as a society – and I believe that understanding these changes are key. Facebook is a great example of content for this medium, but making it the center of discussion is to miss the point.