Objects, apps and websites that ask what technology is doing to us.

What if a flashcard could tell how well you knew the answer, without asking you?

A spaced-repetition flashcard app. The answer arrives letter by letter, and you stop when you know it. You never rate yourself, since people are poor judges of what they know: the letters you needed are the measure, and the scheduler works from them.

Made first for iPhone Duo, where the answer sits on the other side of the fold. Anki decks come in and go back out. No account, no tracking; you pay once.

What if an AI gave students useful feedback on their code, without grading them?

A template for self-hosted course platforms, written for my own teaching. Students sign in with GitHub, work through weekly sessions and in-browser exercises, and hand in challenges as repositories.

An AI reviewer answers with « Validé » or « À retravailler » and a checklist of what is missing, never a mark. Progress is only ever shown as anonymous class totals, “14/26 have done this exercise”: no names, no leaderboards.

What if your outrage is Facebook’s business model?

Why did moral indignation become the default way of doing politics on Facebook? The thesis looks for answers in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and media ecology, and in a close reading of Facebook’s business model.

What if you had to scream into a megaphone before every angry tweet?

A toolkit against emotional incontinence on Twitter. You write or retweet in the app; it reads the emotion and tone of the text and sends you to one of three objects before anything is posted.

Anger or joy: scream into the megaphone for five seconds; the countdown only starts once the microphone distorts. Fear, disgust or confidence: put on the mask and turn your tongue seven times in your mouth, as the French saying goes, while its sensors check that your cheeks touch the metal plates. Sadness, hesitation, analysis, or nothing at all: flip the timer and wait fifteen seconds. Flip it back to cancel.

What if a museum let you touch everything?

Miniature replicas of works from MUDAC’s collections (ceramics, design, glass), 3D-printed in different materials and used as controllers. Turning a replica in your hand turns its scan on the screen and brings up what the museum knows about it.

Made during INT Studio’s residency at MUDAC, as an experiment in non-linear storytelling: handling shapes the information, and the information shapes the handling.

What if a sculpture lit up every time a speaker said a buzzword?

Two totems of light, programmed twice. During the talks, Jeeves was wired to the podium microphone: it spelled out the speakers’ words letter by letter, and broke into animation whenever someone said “artificial intelligence”, “crypto” or “Anthropocene”.

During the concerts, Cosmic Encounters scanned the sky over Geneva and lit up each time a satellite passed above the festival.

What if demagoguery were a rhythm game, and you were an octopus?

A rhythm game for aspiring dictators. In virtual reality you are an octopus at a podium, facing a crowd of octopuses, and you have to deliver the speech and wave your tentacles in time with it.

Made during a workshop with the VR studio Apelab, in the Media Design master at HEAD–Genève.

What if your compass refused to take you anywhere you’d already been?

A connected compass that points to the unknown instead of north. As you move through the world it records where you go and builds a map of everywhere you’ve been, then points you to the nearest way out of those personal borders, projecting the direction onto your hand.

What if 190 independent venues shared one ticketing system, fairly?

Petzi is the federation of Swiss non-profit music venues and festivals, more than 190 of them across 20 cantons and three language regions, and it runs their ticketing. I joined its rebuild in 2017, on design, front end and back end; the new platform launched in early 2018, mostly on volunteer time.

The hard parts came with the scale: keeping visibility fair between clubs, and keeping buyers secure and anonymous.

What if your demographics voted for you?

A scenario in which voting is mandatory and blank votes are forbidden. For the undecided, a machine will vote on your behalf.

Fill in a short demographic form (age, race, state, marital status) and it prints a sticker with your partisan profile, built from data on the 2016 US presidential election. Stick it on your ballot, slip it into the box, and the machine does the rest.

What if putting an avocado in your cart took you to George W. Bush’s living room?

Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa. Visitors in a Vive headset walk an endless warehouse stacked with boxes: avocados, Blu-rays of The Universe: Mega Collection, jet-lag pills.

Pick something up and it carries you somewhere hallucinated. The avocado puts you in the back of a pickup truck, driving through green hills and reversing into George W. Bush’s open-air living room.

What if Machine Project’s newsletters were written by an actual machine?

Machine Project asked me to analyse the newsletters it had sent over fourteen years, for a book on the gallery’s history. I first traced its language through time; “vegetable”, “fish” and “meat” turned out to be negatively correlated.

Then I generated newsletters set in the future. A selection is printed in the book, and a series of events based on the algorithm took place in 2016.

What if you could play with atlas data?

Which country drinks the most wine per person? The Vatican, at 62.2 litres a year. I’ve always liked books of facts and figures, like The Economist’s World in Figures, and found it a little unsettling that a country can be distilled into a few numbers. Factoid tries to hold both feelings.

Each player has 32 cards, one per country. A question from the OECD’s Better Life Index appears on the screen; each player plays the country they think fits best, and the board compares them. Watching people play, the game mostly undoes their assumptions about other countries.

What if a lab’s identity showed how one push sets a whole system moving?

Counterforce Lab is a research and field studio at UCLA, led by Rebeca Méndez, that brings art and design to the environmental and social crises of our time. Its identity starts from a Newton’s cradle: a push at one end, and the whole system moves.

The identity came with a publication on four problems in Los Angeles: the human cost of the Porter Ranch methane leak, urban farming, sprawl and invasive species. Each chapter opens with a series of maps.

I came up with the identity, which Noopur Goel then refined, drew the opening maps and designed the publication’s structure.

What if a playlist could take you back to your first apartment?

An interactive mixtape set in a reconstruction of the studio I lived in from 2008 to 2010. Each song transforms the room, carrying something objective (timbre, lyrics) and something subjective (memories) of the track.

The objects fall into two groups: the ones I still own were 3D-scanned; the ones I got rid of were roughly modelled in Maya. Playable on Oculus Rift or an ordinary screen.

What if colour theory were a contact sport?

A fast colour-matching game for two players. The screen shows a word that hints at a colour: a single word, a whole sentence, sometimes on a misleading background.

Players stack transparent acrylic cards to mix the matching hue, slot them into the reader and press the button. Whoever has the most points when time runs out wins.

What if a webzine came out once a month, as if it were still printed?

« Le Webzine Musical Suisse-Romand »: dossiers, interviews, concert reports and reviews, published as monthly issues rather than a feed. I wrote for it and designed it.

The last issue went out on 1 July 2014, with an editorial titled “Why Pitchfork sucks in 2014”.