Maker Faire Paris Cité des sciences et de l'industrie - Paris, France
Happy Cube Day Le Cube - Issy-les-Moulineaux, France
Le Futur de la Création Mona Bismarck - Paris, France
Refrag Festival - Paris, France
Merge - Plateforme Paris, France
On & Off the Grid Mediamatic - Amsterdam, Neatherlands
A More Fruitful Way to Spend Free Time Plateforme - Paris, France
Broadcast Hysteria Parsons Paris - Paris, France
Savage Minds Parsons Paris - Paris, France
About
Kris Madden is an American designer and creative technologist based in Paris. Her time as an educator inspires her provocative contributions to the high-tech DIY and open source communities. Specializing in programming and physical computing, she creates objects, installations, and websites that push technology’s boundaries to produce new and interactive experiences.
Grow Your Own Phone
Grow Your Own Phone is a critical design project that questions the form and function of the mobile phone. Rejecting trendy, small, sleek, shiny, rectangular mobile phone design, this interactive installation offers the same functions of a traditional mobile phone but within the confines of a garden.
The public are invited to grow in their idea of the mobile phone’s design by engaging with the digitized plants. Using flowers as buttons, individuals can control various mobile phone modules to make calls and send text messages.
Through envisioning this absurd alternative the project poses the question of what other mobile phone alternatives are possible.
Ni Hao, My Ass is a wearable device for asian women who experience racist catcalling. The dress empowers the wearer to denounce the aggressors in a provocative but non-confrontational, non-verbal manner by automating the process.
The user dons a specially designed dress and pair of underwear. When the user experiences a racist catcall, she activates the automated response by pressing a discreetly placed button. The button triggers a motor that raises the back of the dress and reveals the eye-catching red underwear with her retort, “ni hao, racist”.
Lumière to Share employs two custom lamps that work in sync to monitor and distribute a fixed amount of light between two locations. It is a commentary on consumerism and the inequality that exists in the world’s energy consumption. Additionally, this project aims to bring awareness to the importance of using and sharing resources responsibly; if one consumes excessively, the other will lack.
The lamps are designed to be used in separate locations- whether in different rooms, different cities, or different countries. The light available to the lamps must be shared between both locations. When one of the two lamps exceeds the amount of available light, a sound is triggered to alert both users that the limit has been reached. If one user desires more light, they may continue to press the button to increase the light, thus triggering the sound alert with each press. The user on the other end can choose to either ignore the sound or lower their light, which then allows the user lacking light to turn up their lamp.
Each lamp has a limited amount of available light, 10 units, to share between the users. The lamp has two buttons, one to light up (+), and the other one to light down (-). Every time the plus button is pressed, a unit of light is consumed. Once the limit of available light is reached, the light level will remain the same and a sound will be triggered with each additional “+” button push. If one of the users needs to request for more light, he/she can press the "+" button. When one or both of the users turn the light down so that the number of units in use is less than the limit, the sound will no longer sound and the light will be allowed to increase.
These are sketches for hypothetical phones that question different aspects of mobile phones and how we use them. Topics discussed through these designs include privacy, sustainability, addiction, behavioral patterns, convenience, et cetera.
Category:
Illustrations
Date:
March 2018
Neil Says
On December 3, 1992 Neil Papworth of Sema Group Telecoms sent the first text message to a mobile phone. Since that day texting has impacted the design of the mobile phone as well as the English language: prior to texting there was no need for the Q or Z keys and characters limits yielded a technological accent to language. The keyboard featured here uses the E.161 keyboard, which is a standardization recommendation by the International Telecommunication Union, and the lexicon is that of pre-QWERTY keyboard texting.
The installation teleports the user back to when phones were much bigger, had physical buttons, and texting was a particular skill requiring both physical finesse and memory.
This is an ongoing project that explores visual art through creative code. The projects are composed in OpenFrameworks and Processing. They are used as a means for exploring and learning about code and visual aesthetics.
Below are the images 13 generated for a calendar via a p5js sketch similar to the one seen here. Each image's color scheme was chosen to reflect its month.
Uber Beats explores the relationship between contractors and consumers in the gig economy. To do this, Uber Beats pulls live data from Twitter and plugs it into a custom machine learning model via Google's Sentiment Analysis API.
The purpose of Uber Beats is to examine the dynamic between Uber drivers and their passengers through a medium often discussed in the tweets, music. The tweets selected for sentiment analysis contain both the words “uber” and “driver”. The tweets are fed into the analysis model as they are Tweeted and the model returns a value between 1 and 10. This value rates the positivity or negativity of the poster's feelings towards their Uber Driver and links directly to a specific song reflecting its sentiment level. Along with the music playing from the speakers, the front of the boombox displays the latest Tweet on a LCD screen and the sentiment of the Tweet with 10 LEDs.
TLDR: Uber Beats uses music to reflect the driver/passenger relationship in real time.
Category:
Object
Date:
May 2017
myPhone
myPhone is a project that applies DIY and personalization culture to mobile phones. It uses a Raspberry Pi to create a custom phone. Though currently operated through the command line, a GUI will be implemented in the future.
Category:
Website
Date:
February 2017 - TBD
Mistranslations
Mistranslations uses the Google Translate API to highlight the nuances in language. Visitors to the webpage enter in text that is then translated thrice before being translated back to the original language. Try it here.
Category:
Website
Date:
November 2016
Joyaumaton
The Joyaumaton is a proposal and prototype for an installation at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France. Combing the french words ‘joyaux’ and ‘photomaton’, the Joyaumaton is a photo booth that allows users to try on pieces from the museum’s collection. In addition to printing their photo, the Joyaumaton also provides additional information about the pieces.
The Welcoming Mat uses technology to ‘break the ice’ at social gatherings. The doormat plays an audio file when stepped on. The subtle, yet unexpected, interaction provides a conversation starter for guests.
Category:
Object
Date:
December 2015
I Was Here
I Was Here comments on the idea that nothing is real until it is “Facebook official”. Using the Facebook API, I Was Here enables visitors to broadcast that they were indeed ‘here’. By signing into their Facebook and clicking “I was here”, their name is printed on a receipt and a photo of that receipt is posted to their Facebook wall.
Category:
Installation
Date:
December 2016
Protista
Protista is a web organism that lives off of tweets. Each time the hashtag Protista is used, the organism grows. Over time the organism shrinks. If it does not receive attention, it will send out a tweet to remind Twitter of its existence.
[ctrl] is an immersive and interactive installation that uses Kinect, Processing, and Pd-extended to explore if technology can facilitate empathy.
Before entering the installation, participants are asked to sign a consent form to affirm they have no medical conditions that would be affected by sound and flashing lights and to agree to not leaving the installation until they have successfully turned it off.
[ctrl] attempts to help the visitors understand what it feels like to have an invisible illness. Inside the black cube are patronizing signs offering suggestions that do not actually help the visitor. Through moving around the cube, the visitors realize the only way to make the unpleasant experience stop is to crouch in the corner.
The installation hopes to convey the frustration people with invisible illnesses experience from both outside (e.g. societal judgement) and within (e.g. accommodating symptoms).
Category:
Installation
Date:
December 2016
Collective Future
Collective Future examines our conditioning to technological sounds. It imagines a future in which all sounds are artificially added. The honey bee exemplifies this tension between the technology and the natural world.
The Bottled Water Project analyzes bottled water across the globe by looking at the pH, water source, country of origin, and branding. The website visualization used the Sigma.js plugin to display the relationship between each of these factors. Explore the findings here.
Lockless is a project that questions the destructive trend of love locks. It repurposes a traditional symbols of love, the ring box, in stylish packaging to sell used love locks taken from the bridges of Paris. Check out the Lockless Instagram.
Visual Identity
Packaging
Price Tags
The locks are priced based on the ease of picking them: difficult to open locks are priced higher.
The Savage Minds exhibition featured collaborations between students from the MA Fashion Studies, MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies, and MFA Design and Technology programs. Innocence x Knowledge is an interactive installation that uses the viewer's biases to make connections between two images shown on screen.
After curating a collection of objects and images connected to notions of the child/adult dichotomy and keeping in mind the possible manipulations that can taint an innocent object, a random pairing of slides presents the viewer with new information which may challenge, confirm, or change their existing ideas of age. The pairs of images are drawn from two separate collections. The first is a collection of objects related to childhood or intended for use by children, presented with as little context as possible. The second is comprised of images from advertisements, news, movies, pop culture, and art history. The random pairing of object with image encourages the viewer to examine their perception of age and explore the connections that seemingly unrelated subjects may generate.
Category:
Installation
Date:
August 2016
Collaborators:
Tala AlGhamdi, Rachel Fenderson, Sebastian Grant, Nadia Jihad, Forrest Pelsue
Broadcast Hysteria
Broadcast Hysteria is an audio piece made and exhibited as part of a workshop with French artist Hoël Duret. The piece manipulates excerpts from 'Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise' by David Foster Wallace to produce a fictitious radio broadcast.
Category:
Audio
Date:
March 2017
A More Fruitful Way to Spend Free Time
gig economy - a labour market characterised by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work, as opposed to permanent jobs.
This exhibition explores the growing gig economy and platforms like Mechanical Turk, Uber, Deliveroo. Uber Beats examines the dynamic between Uber drivers and their passengers. Pulling data from Twitter, it uses machine learning to perform sentiment analysis on tweets containing “uber” and “driver”. Uber Beats uses music to reflect the driver/passenger relationship in real time.
Category:
Object
Date:
May 2017
On & Off the Grid
The Smart Mirror was created and exhibited as part of the Hackers and Designers Summer Academy. It was developed during a workshop with Gottfried Haider that explored the subject of autonomy in a networked world.
Smart Mirror, which has face recognition, is a Short Person Emulator. If you crouch, the shutters will open, but you can only see the top part of your head. However, when you stand up the shutters close. As a someone who is too short to see into the mirror, you must either be content with seeing half your head or quickly move up and down (e.g. jump) to see your full visage. The mirror comes with a sink, toilet seat and base. #shortpeopleproblems
Collaborators:
Hannes Hulstaert, Dijon Lin, Karina Zavidova
Merge:
An Exhibition of Art && Design with Code
Can digital tools empower citizens to reclaim public monuments? Do automated processes alter the value or meaning of an artwork? How does a story change when you can interact with it? Do you remember a time before smartphones? Does your body move differently in virtual spaces? What can performance and computation tell us about the rituals and politics of hair? What story will a menu from the future tell? Can you imagine a deserted town after a disaster - are you sure you're not there right now?
Eight creative coders ask and explore unique questions about the relationship between art, design and computation.
The 2018 edition of Refrag featured a talk and sculpture by Kris Madden. Her presentation centered around her work with DIY technology and the progress of Grow Your Own Phone.
Nostalgia is a sculpture of the Nokia 5110 that stands at 5 foot 4 inches. It references the popular 90's toy "My Size Barbie" to highlight the viewer's sentimental feelings towards obsolete technology. More information about Refrag at refrag.paris
Zombie Pagers was a workshop created with Martin De Bie for No School Nevers, a two week long summer school for students, artists, designers, makers, hackers, activists and educators.
In a world where governments have the ability to shut down entire communication networks, Zombie Pagers looks at whether reviving old technology is a possible solution to power imbalances in the control of mobile communication networks. The workshop addresses the history of pagers, technology required for a pager network, and social issues that surround communication devices while also encouraging participants to experiment with what information is sent or how it is received.
![[ctrl] by Kris Madden](img/portfolio/ctrl4.gif)
![[ctrl] by Kris Madden](img/portfolio/ctrl2.gif)
![[ctrl] by Kris Madden](img/portfolio/ctrl3.png)
