MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Today, for many, the memories that remain are only those of images taken with digital cameras. Through this continuous storage process, we offload those moments by trusting instantaneous backups. MEMOGRAM challenges this delegation by offering a time capsule in the form of tickets, accompanying our memories with textual clues and descriptions. www.memogram.ch
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
In an environment where the line between digital and tangible is becoming increasingly thin, having an existence in immaterial spaces implies shaping and maintaining an avatar that is often created in one’s own image. Living in these in-between worlds inevitably leads to the development of a more or less strong connection with one’s own digital representations. This is notably the case of my own avatar, with whom I share more than just a well-defined clothing style. In Mirror Me-rror, she and I become one. By using my physical and digital data to influence her abilities as my “virtual self”, I find myself constantly connected to her. With this project, I question the relationship that each of us nurtures with our digital identities and offer a gamified perspective of our own lives.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
How can artists/designers share and enrich their practice in a context where videoconferencing is becoming one of the most used means of disseminating content? In the form of a mini web-conference, Public Lectures consists of a succinct presentation of the work of people active in the field of culture through audiovisual content. Encouraging interaction, through comments and content exchange, Public Lectures seeks to erase the usual boundaries between presenter and viewer. A form of horizontality is thus born within the platform, inviting people to contribute in order to bring out innovative forms of dialogue and to meet the challenges of this new means of communication.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
The mirroring system of instant messaging implies the presumed availability of the interlocutor. However, while waiting for a response, certain questions become recurrent: “Alex is online, why isn’t he answering? What is he doing?” Latent* is a chat application that allows you to converse with your friends by developing the context of the discussion and what is not said. Just like theatre, it fuels the conversation by adding didascalies generated according to the collected data (response time, location). By highlighting the unsaid parts of an exchange, the generated reading mode enriches the discussion, creates poetic tension, and allows the interlocutors to become the characters of their own play. www.melaniefontaine.ch
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Digital DNA is a 3D data visualisation platform that displays an analysis of the content that is shown to me on Instagram. The interface compares the duality of my perception with that of the algorithm. It results in a virtual space representing a digital genome that visitors are invited to explore in order to discover the subtleties of the intersection between human and algorithmic perspectives. While studying these “smart” systems, I became aware that their ability to analyse is somewhat biased. Some of the categories I was assigned were unexpected and did not match the visuals presented. In this way, Digital DNA highlights the gap created by this contrast between the categories and the visuals that are displayed. Try it here
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Spectacle·s Museum looks at the photographs of visitors in a museum space. Through a web atlas, this project paints a series of portraits in one of the most photographed museums in the world, the Louvre. Using images published on Instagram, the project classifies and groups them according to their formal and spatial specificities. Through Spectacle·s Museum, I approach the theme of the staging of the self, particularly in the museum space.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Phone Archaeology is an interactive installation that traces the evolution of mobile phones through my own experience. The project reveals a digitalised, speculated, and recovered private life, like traces of the past. This memory engraved in silicon that tends to be obsolete is the story of memories left behind every time we change phones. Research around Phone Archaeology brings to light a form of reflection on our data. The matter of data recovery is intrinsically linked to digital archiving and planned obsolescence. While the abstraction of a digital file may seem timeless, the imminent danger of losing even more digital memories forces us to rethink how we archive them. phonearchaeology.com
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
The Last Forest offers a browser-based walkable forest of spatialised information about collapse in general. Internet users are invited to wander through it and to find posts from the r/collapse reddit community in the form of trees. The categorisation and index provide a more structured browsing of the information contained in the trees. The Last Forest aims to raise awareness about climate change and its potential to end globalised, consumerist civilisation as we know it.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Twist was thought out as part of the upcoming industrial design exhibition at mudac - Musée cantonal de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains. The aim of this project is to engage children’s curiosity about design, for whom the idea of visiting a museum is often not the most exciting. How can we encourage a stimulating visit and discovery of the exhibits? By bringing out an object from the exhibition, the Bold chair by Big-Game studio, this project transforms it into an interactive installation. Guided by a character on screen, children are invited to interact with certain parts of the chair: sitting, pinching, turning, etc. These interactions trigger games, and information is presented in a playful way, thus creating a direct and memorable relationship with the object and raising awareness of design.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Per Aspera Ad Astra is a web-documentary that tells the story of five women astronomers who were in charge of discovering, calculating, classifying and mapping the cosmos between 1879 and 1979. This project aims to rehabilitate the crucial contribution made by women in STEM. In the early days, before the word “computer” was used to describe a machine, it was in actual fact used to describe a person, namely the women who made calculations and observations by hand. The “Harvard Computers” significantly contributed to astronomy and science by discovering many galaxies and establishing the stellar classification system that is still in use today. Nowadays, however, we speak very little about these five women; their work remains unknown, and their discoveries have often been attributed to the men who employed them. per-aspera-ad-astra.vercel.app
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
“My project aims to demystify FM synthesis and to offer a new approach to its programming. After analysing various FM synthesizers and their interface, I identified two major problems: - The difficulty of understanding how they work - The complexity of sound exploration My project offers two objects to remedy these problems: a guide, based on texts in FM Theory & Applications, which enables the user to understand FM synthesis in a theoretical way, and a synthesizer that enables the user to explore the basics of synthesis with a more hands-on approach, thanks to an interface that offers all the controls without “menu diving”. These two objects provide the user with an ideal introduction to electronic music.”
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
At a time when music can be accessed anywhere and at any time, how can one compose an interactive and evolving album that takes into account its environment? In an ode to strolling around Lausanne, the auditor discovers a polyphonic orchestra while walking through the city’s landmarks. The mobile phone becomes the tool for a composition that features different sound layers, revealed throughout the walk, where the music no longer has a pre-established duration but varies according to the places that are visited. By their geolocation, the listeners/composers initiate new musical tracks as they walk along. A more organic mode of listening is introduced, where compass and binaural sounds reveal the abstract and digital substance that floats around us.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Alter provides users with a platform to take control of an alter-ego, whose virtual identity is based on archetypes observed on Instagram. The primary intention of the project is to explore the possibility that social networks offer to live experiences that are not our own. Thus, Alter highlights the typical profiles that have been instituted on Instagram over the years. These different archetypes incorporate various ways of showing off, staging oneself or communicating. These archetypes influence, despite ourselves, the way we use certain networks. The project consists of two distinct parts: on the one hand, the observation and study of these different archetypes, and on the other, their use in a webapp.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
The Goko is a digital musical instrument that explores new ways of playing music. It is a chord machine in the form of a MIDI controller. This tool promotes and facilitates the composition of chords. It enables beginners to play while having fun and offers professionals a new understanding and visualisation of the rules of musical harmony.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Miksyn is an installation that invites us to rethink our relationship with living things by challenging our natural aversion to the various insects and arachnids of our domestic ecosystem, my primary motivation being to highlight the unexplored richness of microscopic forms. Miksyn is part of research on digital interactions with the microcosm. By decontextualising these tiny creatures under the lens of a high-resolution optical microscope, my project puts the spotlight on their imperceptible peculiarities. Can we use technology to overcome our bodily limitations and awaken a holistic conception of nature?
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
In a world dominated by images, where content is constantly blasted at our brain, the race for maximum performance and ultra-high definition feels endless. (un)load chooses to go beyond the classic forms of digital experience. With this tool, we will try to dive into a molecular state, where the single unit becomes the whole. In a kind of reverse cinema, you will be deprived of some of your senses and will reach overload through extreme reduction. Expressing the constant overload we experience as a society and the capacity we have to construct our own relationship to the world, (un)load explores the narrative potential of immersive technologies, based on the senses and beyond representation. Warning: this work contains flashing lights.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Nowadays, almost all of us have adopted the unconscious reflex of pulling out our smartphone when we are faced with some form of loneliness or passivity. Hence, it has become difficult for us to cope with waiting without the help of our cell phones. The aim of Oblique Reasoning is to invite users to question notions of attention economy and FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) while offering, in the manner of Oblique Strategies, reflections and alternatives. By recording unread notifications and quantifying them in units of time, this portable device offers us the possibility to step back and rethink our relationship with the smartphone.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
In 2020, we reached a tipping point with the mass of man-made artefacts exceeding the biomass on our planet. This is mainly due to an economic system of manufacturing and consumption where the overabundance of objects has become the norm. Overloaded.supply is a semi-autonomous system that exploits the control of creation algorithms in order to question current patterns of design, production and legislation. To do so, the installation allows users, via a physical interface, to control an intangible, invisible and vast universe of objects where they can take possession of them through a fictitious patent document. This document will be stored on a dedicated website that acts as a repository of already protected objects that may or may not be produced. overloaded.supply
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Confessionnal is a web app that enables users to anonymously confess their behaviour on social networks. With the advent of social media years ago, the behaviour of users varies. Unmentionable acts are sometimes committed on these platforms. This project is inspired by the Catholic confessional as we know it but is based on the digital era we live in. Users live the anonymous experience with a mask as participants or spectators. They confess orally and personalise their mask based on their age, the platform or the main subject of the confession. On the other hand, they can observe other masks and listen to the confessions of other users.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Is This the Middle East? investigates representation of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in a selection of video games. I am interested in the patterns, repetitive artefacts, locations and texts in games that claim to be set in the MENA region. These objects become archetypes. Are these photo-realistic environments also realistic in the scenes they depict or do they become another backdrop for war-related games? Using photogrammetry to reconstruct these environments, I address the implications of seeing an abundance of often over-simplified images of the Middle East, especially in a world where video games are becoming not only a global phenomenon, but also a means to encounter other cultures.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Through a narrative experience, Sanctuaires invites visitors to discover their relationship with plants. This project is structured as an interactive exhibition on the great trees of the city of Lausanne. As in a treasure hunt, visitors have to look for the trees, thanks to clues and a map on the app. When they find one, they connect to it through touch, thus triggering the beginning of the experience. Like a wise storyteller, the sanctuary-tree shares a tale with the visitors, telling them about its sensitive experience and observable universe. Urban tree development coincides with the advent of issues related to the ecological crisis. What do trees have to say about this and how can their perception help us improve our lifestyles?
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Mention Très bien Through our entertainment media, partnerships and sponsored content are becoming omnipresent. Based on this observation, Reif i s a fictional account of the objectification of a digital influencer. Through different media created with computer generated images, we visualise the change of identity of this character who allocates areas of her body as advertising spaces, generating her metamorphosis from human to object. In order to realise the content for Reif , a process of digital production was set up, adjusting to the standards of avatar creation which affiliates this fiction to the current technical reality.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Once upon a time, a few Homo Sapiens allowed humanity to escape the endless cycle of life and death. Together, leaving behind their individuality, they merged into a new form of existence, beyond humanity – as if in this second genesis man had created God in his own image. Data Riot questions the foundations of human individuality through a social science fiction halfway between a video game and a music video. Enter a futuristic world and experience your transplantation into a collective intelligence to the rhythm of the electronic sounds of the collective Curl. Based on your personal data and your decisions, the experience adapts to you and offers a disturbing experience of your own identity.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
The barrier of entry to sound synthesis software has historically been kept high by visually abstract, overloaded interfaces and expensive ecosystems like those of Pure Data or MAX. Tone Alembic seeks to make sound experimentation accessible to a beginner audience. It does so by offering a platform consisting of a digital interface that abstracts many of the concepts of synthesis in favour of a more visual approach and a set of MIDI controllers that allow more hands-on interaction with the interface while providing everything one needs to get started creating sounds.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Grappaa is an artist-run exhibition space that I began working on in early 2021. It was built based on makeshift institutional spaces, e.g. art fairs and more recently, mass vaccination centres. The walls and furniture in these mega events become modules in the landscape of barren multipurpose warehouses. For Grappaa, through a process of urban hacking, the car parks become the grid for any spatial configuration. I pay rent by the hour. It’s not cheap.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
IFTTA (If This Then Authenticate) is a modular authentication kit that allows users to design passwords to access their digital environment. Nowadays the majority of online services require complex authentication from their users. However, our ability to manage our passwords is becoming time consuming: we forget, make mistakes and retype. By default, we have accepted the present systems in place: double verification, SMS, phone calls, e-mails, etc. What if we tried something different? A more personal approach for example. This kit reflects the way we want to view our relationship with passwords. Each of the proposed modules involves a distinct mnemonic interaction: touch, position in space, hearing and sight. These elements can be added up as well in order to design a personalised authentication system.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Mindmaze, Laura Nieder, Tibor Udvari
“Harder, better, faster, stronger” was a one week workshop in collaboration with Mindmaze exploring playful interactions with medical sensors and devices.
FOUNDATION YEAR
Exposition de travaux d'étudiant·e·s à l'elac (l’espace lausannois d’art contemporain) à l'occasion d'une semaine de workshops en Année Propédeutique.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
At bedtime there is nothing like reading a tale alone with your child to smoothly transition from excitement to calm. Snuggled up against you, your child enjoys this intimate moment and escapes into his/her imagination to the rhythm of the story. With the help of soundscapes, Taalee seeks to reinforce this magical moment. Taking the form of a mobile app, Taalee offers a creative and sharing space accessible to all and thus enables anyone to add to their stories with the use of featured compositions or by creating your own.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Pump and Surf encourages internet users to find out how much energy is spent when they are surfing the internet. Before being able to view a website, internet users are asked to make a physical effort similar to the energy required to convey the data that will enable the site to be displayed. Through interactive experiences and graphic visualisations, Pump and Surf leads users to take the measure of the quantity of energy involved in the exchange of information, to the point of feeling them physically.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Nowadays, we continuously capture images in which we place the hope of memory. In fact most of these images are left abandoned in the mass of our galleries and dormant hard drives. Caption exposes forgotten images taken from the gallery of its users. Through a series of questions we are invited to look inwardly at our relationship with these images. By synthesising and exposing all the answers collected, Caption immerses us into ethnographic research that addresses our collective relationship with the images.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Concrete is an immersive experience that offers to discover digital architectures through lights and shadows that reveal the volumes and geometry of these environments. A tangible interface of concrete and electronics controls the parts of these buildings. To access the various structures, each person is invited to solve an enigma based on a pattern of light. With Concrete, I aimed to combine reflection on how we interact with a digital world with brutalist architectural inspirations and a playful experience of virtual reality.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
What time is it at Hortense’s in Montreal? What’s the weather like at Alexandre’s in Tokyo? When I communicate with my loved ones, scattered all over the world, I am disconnected from my physical time-space. Sources of constant artificial light and windows on the digital world, screens replace the sun as a space-time reference point. Sun Connection enables you to reconnect with your loved ones through a delocalised sun. Everyone is free to use their own physical and digital space with a luminous and colourful presence, to transpose themselves into another time and space.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
MoodWalk is a music player that enables one to discover music in a different way. It generates sound moods based on a city’s musical programmes (clubs/concert halls/bars/cultural venues). The app works in two different modes thanks to geolocation: a “compass” and a “walking” mode. Aiming to offer a local and radically alternative way of discovering music, MoodWalk seeks to burst existing algorithmic bubbles in order to offer a tool to discover the surrounding soundscape.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
FRAME-Lab offers a series of immersive experiences that provide new ways of interacting with a virtual reality environment. The traditional controller is replaced by a physical frame that enables you to explore various worlds and functionalities. This new interface, both tangible and digital, can thus take the form of a shield, a portal to travel in time and space, or that of a parachute. This interface frame is offered to the community of makers as 3D files available online that anyone can transform and print at home.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
In performing arts, there is often, by convention, some distance, an invisible screen that separates the audience from the actors in the performance. Yet these respective positions have changed over time. Bauhaus artists actually aimed for total theatre, where the entire venue would be the stage. Strike the Pose is a participatory VR experience that begins from the moment we wait. A re-interpretation of Oskar Schlemmer’s “Triadic Ballet”, this complete and inclusive work invites all participants to enter through their acting into a total composition, both physical and digital.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
In 2020, with the emergence of Covid-19, people self-quarantined. For many this was an opportunity to reflect on their situation. Lockdown Memorial Archive enables anyone to share their story about the confinement and to become aware of the feelings of others. Through a web app, participants are invited to personalise an emblematic object and to link it to an account of their experience. The overall result thus constitutes an archive made up of several immersive memorials where one can relive this situation of isolation in a different way.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
Invisible Network is a portable device that makes the invisible and autonomous communications of machines perceptible and tangible. The way they interact with each other is akin to the modes of human communication, thus creating a real social network of machines. This device mediates between users and the machines around them. Via the screen it transmits fragments of its continuous and silent communications in the form of human social metaphors.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo, Laura Nieder, Pauline Saglio
“Lasius Flavus” is an immersive and didactic experience developed in collaboration with the Museum of Zoology. Throughout the tour, visitors discover the world of the yellow ant, its habitat and perception of the world. This interactive VR project offers an interpretation of these various aspects to lead us to reflect on the relationship that each species has with its environment. Moreover, the exercise of thinking on a scale that is not ours can help us question our own future.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Pauline Saglio, Vincent Jacquier, Laura Nieder
Information Mesh is a web platform celebrating the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web that explores social, technical, cultural and legal facts throughout different interactive timelines. It was initiated in October 2018 during a one week workshop in partnership with swissnex San Francisco, where students visited key partners and began developing the project. The timelines present an overview of Web history, starting with the proposal for hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989, initially under the name “Information Mesh.” From this start date, users can then explore 30 years of evolution. infomesh.org
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Pauline Saglio, Vincent Jacquier
Fantastic Smartphones – a series of interactive installations developed by students in Bachelor Media & Interaction Design at ECAL, investigating in a critical and offbeat way our relationship with smartphones and the way they influence our daily behavior. See the press room
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Cyril Diagne, Alain Bellet
“Error is human and to blame it on a robot is even more so” Mixed media installation with Thymio robots (EPFL/Mobsya), commissioned by Vitra Design Museum. Presented until 14 May in the exhibition “Hello, Robot” at the Vitra Design Museum. design-museum.com
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Cyril Diagne, Vincent Jacquier, Florian Pittet (Sigmasix), Pauline Saglio, Eric Morzier (Sigmasix)
Do objects sometimes dream about themselves? What if we could enter their dreams? Virtual reality? Connected objects? On the occasion of the Milan International Furniture Fair 2016, the ECAL students of the Bachelor Media and Interaction Design present a collection of interactive experiments.
MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN
with Alain Bellet, Christophe Guignard, Gaël Hugo
Matter is a puzzle game where the player follows a light beam, reflected or refracted from a material to another, revealing new structures and new possibilities of interaction with light along the way. Creating a game was a new experience for me that I had long wanted to achieve and that allowed me to share my passion about the particle world and its emptiness. What we call matter is almost an illusion as it is only energy and information.