Our workshop with Dev Joshi from rAndom International is going on well during the week, with different ideas cast into the direction of digital shadows, traces and footprints.
The students are encouraged to produce objects, although it has been suggested that they take advantage of space as well (installations), as the workshop takes place in a large studio (cinema studio at ECAL).
Alexia Léchot chose to focus on the school’s own “temporary files” server (considered for this occasion as a “local cloud”), it is used by the students for their work in progress. This server can be considered as a space of transit, since the works it hosts are erased at the end of each day and the disk space made clean again for a new day of work at ECAL. Its aim is to reduce friction in the schools workflow.
Above: Alexia Léchot and Dev Joshi fiddling with a blob-detection library.
Benjamin Botros is focusiong on one user history in particular, a user profile on the STEAM online gaming platform. Working on a way to tell this past gamer story from his online data.
Above: Benjamin Botros setting up some code to showcase the STEAM user’s profile.
Another group, composed of Edina Desboeufs and Pierre Georges is working on the school’s general flow of users in a dedicated area (the school’s cafeteria), focusing on moments of traffic and is looking at an anamorphic way of beaming this content back again on a screen in the same space. They are trying to produce perceptual distortions between what is happening at a certain time in this particular space and what is being recorded. A kind of metaphor about the “cloud” according to Edina and Pierre, where we usually leave a mix of files, data and memories from the past and present.
A group composed of Pablo Perez, Lara Défayes, Julie-Lou Bellenot and Karen Pisoni is working around a long forgotten email account, which is not monitored or checked by it’s main user anymore (for years), but is kept fed nonetheless! The email account remains active indeed and mainly receives mails sent by bots and subscription services. The general idea behind their project is to give visibility to this almost random form automated life.
Last but not least, a group composed of Lina Vozniuk-Berzhaner, Mylène Dryer and Jasmine Florentine (who joined us from EPFL-ECAL Lab especially for this workshop), is chosing to work around a personal Twitter account. In particular its long gone history. Their work investigates the perspective in which tweets could reflect our stream of thoughts and interests at a given time in our life, like a fragment of ourselves. They’re looking into a design which would enable the user to navigate through these past “ghosts” of this personal Twitter account in a poetic way.
We’ll be now busy documenting the final projects, however we’ll post an article documenting everything as soon as we’re done!
Finally, we would like to thank Dev Joshi from rAndom International and the students for this great week of design research work.
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