Is This Art? is an attempt of collective reflection, dressed as a provocatively simple interface.

Workshop developed as outcome of the research Object-Oriented Subject, where my colleague Lídia Pereira and I investigate the methods and strategies employed by Facebook, as well as by other parties, to build user profiles. Our attention is turned towards the inferences Facebook makes, i.e., the inclusion, in these profiles, of some properties that were not obtained through direct users’ input.

The workshop was designed for a broad audience and therefore is intended to be easily grasped. With that in mind, we translated one of the methods we investigated into a series of visual elements, so that the entire process could be followed without the use of any computers.

Beerpong or Voltaire?, the title of this workshop, refers to Facebook content which can potentially indicate, with high accuracy, whether a user is likely to be an extrovert or an introvert. This prediction is based on the trivial act of liking content on Facebook.

In the context of this workshop we use a fictional dataset composed of User Likes and psychological data which is traditionally obtained from extensive questionnaires. This fictional dataset allows us to infer the participants’ personality traits based on their choices during the workshop.

Rather than building trustworthy psychological profiles, our aim is to illustrate one of the methods deployed to infer user characteristics from available user data, by Facebook as well by many others. We wish to start a discussion around the possible consequences this process might have upon our daily lives.

Regarding the workshop material, Lídia Pereira defined the colors, typography and designed the stickers and I was in charge of designing the graphics and the booklet.

Excelfie is an experiment where a spreadsheet is used in a new context. It is a simple idea, both conceptually (populate a spreadsheet with numbers that do not actually mean anything but actually perform a graphical representation) and technically:

1. take a selfie snapshot
2. read each pixel's intensity value (how dark/light it is) from the selfie file
3. convert this value into a character (according to the set of characters that you want to use)
4. place these characters inside an excel file, each in the corresponding cell, using the image file structure (number of rows and columns) as reference.

Voilà, you have an excelfie!

My original wish was to use only numbers (and the empty cell) but most numbers do not represent the variations in the gray scale so well as other characters, so I am using a mix of numbers and signs such as #, % and +.

You are welcome to download the file. Despite the file extension, it can also be opened using Open Office and Libre Office. ;)

Derivation #1

The experiment has one derivation so far, which is a performance/installation where selfies are typed out using a typewriter. Excelfie - Derivation #1 has been featured at the Post-Digital Publishing Archive, performed at Zine Camp 2017 - WORM/UBIK Rotterdam November 11 & 12 and presented during Berlin Poetry Festival 2018, in the exhibition Types of Typewriting at Oqbo Gallery, curated by Annette Gilbert and Michael Glasmeier, between May 24 and June 23, 2018.

Cassandra is a voice-operated chatbot, aimed at making psychological profiles during the conversations. These profiles are shown as pie charts where every color corresponds to a personality attribute. The graphics are accompanied by a short analysis and a list of companies possibly interested in the profile. In this sense, the bot provides data that can act as a mediator in services like job-seeking and dating. The profile then becomes a digital representation of the user and can be used as a kind of 'digital key' to personalize the relationship between the user and every gadget in the near future of the Internet of Things. Make your life easier, let Cassandra make a digital copy of you.

Presented at Hofpoort as part of the exhibition Tempted by Tomorrow.

An exercise regarding subjective connections and databases, which served as the basis for the graduation project in my Master at PZI: a dataset of connected words.

The interface for making the connections can be found at https://luciadossin.net/fadb/ and the (not real-time) results can be seen at https://luciadossin.net/fadb/results/.

First-year students from the Master Media Design and Communication course at Piet Zwart Institute were requested to document the Graduation Project of their second-year colleagues. This booklet documents part of the working process of Marlon Harder, called Gallery Template. It is the compilation of three short interviews done in May and June 2014 and two sets of photos made during the building up of the exhibition at TENT, in Rotterdam.

The photos were taken from two fixed cameras, so that the two photo sequences could be printed as a flipbook.

Bibliotecha is a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local wifi hotspot. Using the browser to connect to the library one can retrieve or donate texts. Bibliotecha proposes an alternative model of distribution of digital texts that allows specific communities to form and share their own collections.

My participation in the project consisted on workshops, research and development along with André Castro, Roel Abbing, Yoana Buzova, Michaela Lakova - among many others.

What happens when there is plenty of time to reflect on what you're doing online - more specifically, when you're buying something?

'Let me think' is as an exercise on how to critically react to interfaces that are designed to discourage users to reflect about their behavior. The bestseller titled 'Don't make me think' is a source of guidelines to such approach and the inspiration for this exercise.

The result of this exercise is a browser extension - which has to be installed in Firefox - that gives time to the shopper during their experience in Amazon. It can be enabled or disabled whenever the user desires and it can also be customized according to the user's own wishes.

Let me Think was launched during Buy Nothing Day 2014.

Print Cake is an installation/performance where cupcakes are decorated with a snippet of William Morris' News from Nowhere printed on edible paper with edible ink and sold for customers/visitors.

There are two kinds of cupcakes: the standard and the customized. The former costs less than the latter. In the customized version, customers choose a color and a word, through a simple interface (a one-page website running on full screen browser). The chosen word generates a snippet of text (taken from News from Nowhere) which is then placed onto a designed template and in combination with the chosen color. This is printed on edible paper and placed on top of the cupcake. In the standard version no choices are possible — they all have the same color and just a few variations on the text snippets.

Presented at V2_, Rotterdam, as part of the exhibition Politics of Craft.