English

A Web Odyssey deals with the navigation on the Web. It is based on "The Odyssey" by Homer and the figure of Ulysses trying to navigate back to Ithaca.

This interactive narrative features the different episodes of The Odyssey (the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso...). The goal of the user is to reconnect to the e-thaca network. Parallels are then drawn between the oblivion caused by the lotos flowers and the infinite scrolling of social networks, the eye of the Cyclops and the webcam which monitors the Internet user (and which must be blinded or disabled), the Underworld and the Dark Web... The ecological question is also addressed through the Sirens, who feed on human flesh, and the streaming platforms which consume a lot of energy and data and feed on the resources of our environment.

The Greeks associated a mythological divinity with each phenomenon. They accepted not to be able to understand everything, and the gods often served as an explanation. Centuries later, don't we have the same relationship with digital technologies? Are human beings free to make their own choices or do they have to obey their Fate, the Greeks wondered. Are human beings simple pawns, constrained in their choices, or sovereign creatures with free will? When we navigate on the Web, especially on platforms, we can often feel the same tension as the one felt by Ulysses during his perilous journey…

This narrative, which articulates literary, educational and recreational dimensions, is available in French and English. It invites us to reflect on our digital milieu, social media, platforms… and more broadly on digital technologies.

Source: exhibition documentationPresentation: http://www.utc.fr/~bouchard/works/presentation-odyssey.pdf

Research into the possibilities of a chatbot as a poetic device.

The Coronary's starting point is a set of 25 words, popular in the context of Covid-19, such as Zoom, alcohol gel, and pandemic, for which we offer a small glossary. A heat map dynamically checks the audience’s attention regarding the words we listed in the coronavirus lexicon. The most accessed by the audience change their color on a scale that varies from blue (cooler) to red (hotter and, therefore, more accessed). These heat maps have become recurrent images in the context of Covid-19. They are key images in the pandemic context. Coronary appropriates the visual vocabulary of the coronavirus to perform a critical "live surveillance" exercise. This appropriation allows the public to watch a standard procedure of monitoring how they access the Internet, which is usually invisible and ignored. At the same time, the Coronary discusses the symbolic capital of attention and its structuring role in the economy of attention and the politics of gaze that rules the digital world. Finally, while interpreting the coronavirus in the context of culture, the Coronary assumes that we are facing not only one of the most severe public health crises in history. The coronavirus is also a landmark time of the consolidation, as well as the emergence, of social and economic transformations in the globalization process.

"Sentenced to Covid: Voices of the Pandemic" displays our single-sentence responses to the pandemic. You can read the responses in either manual or auto mode (the latter which provides an endless looping display of the responses). If you want, you can write your own response for others to see.

Source: exhibition documentation

Brooklyn Baxter is rich and the world should ideally be his oyster. However, he is trapped inside the shells of his own mind. But rich kids do not get sad.

After getting transferred from yet another school, he is forced into Behavioral Modification as a part of his curriculum where he meets Anastasia Collins. 

On scholarship. On Behavioral Mod. And on a wheelchair.

When a mutual friend takes his own life after his forced sex tape is leaked, his family slowly seems to steadily fall apart and the ghosts of his past threaten to come back and haunt him, Brooklyn turns to Anastasia for an escape.

Because in togetherness, there is peace.

And in solidarity, there is hope.

They embark on a life-changing road trip.

The (auto)biography of 김정은 is a conceptual 'found' artwork in VII parts. It combines found code with found text. Multiple 'found' computational pieces have been modified with vocabulary drawn from multiple speeches delivered by the current North Korean Leader, Kim Jong-un/김정은. In addition, vocabulary and phrases from journalism critical of the North Korean regime are also incorporated into these generative works.This work represents a ‘dystopic platform’. On the one hand, this work is an experiment in propaganda delivery: it emulates the relentlessness of the North Korean indoctrination machine and shows how born-digital writing can be stolen and misused; in so doing, it reveals digital literature's power. As part of this process, a Kim Jong-un 'poetic robot' has been created to demonstrate how such propaganda might be delivered/forced upon a populace. This work also seeks to capture the perspective of a curious, intelligent yet powerless North Korean citizen and demonstrate how they might (struggle to) engage with local culture.

The Bug is a browser demo presented as a single page of HTML, with CSS, JavaScript, and a Base64 encoded image all part of that one page. It is a trilingual digital poem, with sound, that computationally glitches itself in different ways, transforming the background image, the text, and the music.