This installation and performance departed from the concept of sonifying gas data produced from decentralized networks – where gas refers to the computational effort required to execute operations on the Ethereum network. Each transaction requires fees that fluctuate unpredictably, particularly during the energy crisis following the Ukrainian war.

The piece interrogates the limits of networks claiming to be decentralized while remaining dependent on centralized global energy infrastructures now in crisis. Through sonic translation of blockchain data, the work reveals the material dependencies that underpin supposedly immaterial digital economies, questioning the environmental and geopolitical implications of crypto-economic systems.

This critical making practice employs sound as a means of making visible the invisible infrastructures that sustain digital capitalism, inviting reflection on the contradictions between technological promises of decentralization and the reality of continued dependence on extractive energy systems.

Photos: Teddevo

Documentation

This participatory performance and LARP (Live Action Role Play) investigates new methodologies for collective decision-making through cybernetic roleplay. Participants receive phones and headsets that assign them roles within a spatial "decisional grid" – a performance environment inspired by global parliamentary architectures and stock market trading floors.

The project employs spatial power dynamics through color-coded zones and numerical systems that guide participant movement, creating embodied experiences of political and economic decision-making processes. Each session accommodates up to 20 participants following pre-written scenarios, with a custom interface (the "decisions architecture editor") enabling collaborative scenario development and real-time execution.

Concerned with conventional methods of urban participation, this work proposes LARP as design methodology – using roleplay as a research tool for understanding and reimagining collective governance. The project contributes to discussions about participatory urbanism and speculative democracy, demonstrating how performance can serve as both critique and prototype for alternative decision-making systems.

The work has been presented at WorkHardPlayHard festival (Minsk), Château de Vullierens (Morges), Royal College of Arts (London), and NYU Shanghai, receiving nomination for the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation excellence award.

HEAD Publishing was initiated by HEAD Geneva as a way to create an in-house publishing house, representing research into contemporary publishing workflows and digital editorial practices within design education contexts. I designed and led the project, developing both the editorial workflow for publications and the technological infrastructure using entirely open source technologies and digitally coded layers with Paged.js.

The project explores how institutions can develop sustainable publishing models bridging traditional print culture with emerging digital possibilities through collaborative editorial processes. The system allows export in EPUB, PDF formats, print-on-demand through Lulu, as well as generating long-read web versions from the collaborative editing system. The work investigates new forms of academic and artistic publishing prioritizing accessibility, community engagement, and experimental formats through open source technological approaches.

Publishing functions as a site of collective knowledge production rather than individual authorship, challenging conventional academic hierarchies through experimental publishing practices. This research contributes to ongoing discussions about the future of academic publishing, particularly within art and design education, exploring how institutions can support more equitable and experimental publishing practices that serve community needs over commercial interests.

IntranetCV was a project to create an internal internet for the visual communication department, designed for students and professors to use as a tool for better communication. This experiment explored how a department could develop its own tools, recognizing that the tools we use shape us in fundamental ways.

The platform comprised a set of tutorials, documents, and a calendar used exclusively by students and faculty, creating an autonomous digital environment outside corporate social media structures. Through experimental web interfaces and alternative networking protocols, the project investigated how educational communities can create their own systems for knowledge sharing and professional development.

This work contributes to broader discussions about digital autonomy and alternative internet infrastructure, exploring how institutions and communities can resist surveillance capitalism while fostering genuine community connections through self-determined technological practices that serve pedagogical rather than commercial interests.

L'optimisation du travail domine les discours corporatifs, avec des systèmes comme Methods Time Measurement (MTM) marquant des changements radicaux dans les attitudes du travail manuel en priorisant l'efficacité du mouvement tout en négligeant la santé corporelle.

makebook makesport propose la "machine parfaite pour les designers" – un appareil d'exercice qui permet la création simultanée de mises en page de livres pendant les séances d'entraînement physique. Des phrases motivantes et des images défilent devant les utilisateurs, créant une ambiance divertissante pendant l'exercice. Après chaque séance d'entraînement, les utilisateurs peuvent imprimer leur livre personnalisé comme souvenir de cette expérience de design incarnée.

Cette machine d'exercice critique interroge la relation entre travail physique, production créative et bien-être corporel sous le capitalisme contemporain. En combinant la culture du fitness avec la pratique du design, le projet révèle comment ces deux domaines marchandisent la performance corporelle tout en promettant optimisation et amélioration de soi.

L'œuvre contribue aux conversations sur l'incarnation du travail et le biocapital, démontrant comment le design spéculatif peut critiquer la quantification du travail créatif et physique tout en proposant des relations alternatives entre corps, esprit et activité productive.

faire des livres et faire du sport !

This participatory performance investigates the relationship between computational logic and embodied knowledge by asking participants to physically enact different programmatic qualities of contemporary visual coding languages. Participants are invited to dance code sequences with their bodies on a performance mat, collectively creating the visual image that their code was intended to generate.

The project explores somatic computation – the idea that bodily movement and algorithmic thinking share fundamental structural relationships. By translating abstract computational processes into physical gesture, the performance reveals the embodied dimensions of supposedly disembodied digital processes, questioning traditional separations between mind, body, and machine.

This work contributes to critical discussions about embodied AI and corporeal computing, demonstrating how performance can serve as a methodology for understanding and critiquing computational culture through lived, physical experience rather than theoretical abstraction alone.

The performance took place at the Open House of HEAD Geneva in 2019.

"Ces dernières années ont vu l’émergence d’un intérêt grandissant pour la recherche, que l’on mesure à l’aune des axes et des projets développés dans les écoles d’art, du nombre croissant de thèses en préparation dans les universités et les écoles d’art, du travail de consolidation fait par différents acteurs institutionnels.

Faire de la recherche, c’est se donner l’opportunité de nourrir en retour la pratique, c’est contribuer à documenter son l’histoire, à en renforcer l’ancrage contextuel. C’est aussi tenter de dégager ce qui fait la spécificité de l’activité du designer graphique, à la frontière du champ artistique et de nombreuses autres pratiques. Dépassant une conception du design graphique comme art décoratif, la recherche semble bien permettre de réaffirmer le rôle fondamental du design graphique dans notre société.

Pour en prendre la mesure, il faut reculer un peu pour adopter un point de vue sur le point de vue, qui est aussi un point de vue sur un paysage, formé par des lieux de production de la recherche (laboratoires, écoles, universités), peuplé par des acteurs, traversé par des problématiques, elles-mêmes appuyées sur des écrits et des projets dont la sédimentation progressive peut bien concourir à donner à cette discipline son épistémologie.

À quoi peut bien ressembler le paysage de la recherche en design graphique ? C’est à cette question que tente de répondre cette exposition, qui en retour, peut elle-même se lire et se penser comme une cartographie.
Le design graphique est toujours au sujet d’autre chose que le design graphique. La recherche peut à ce titre s’interroger sur le monde social, la politique, les images ou l’écriture, la typographie et le signe, leur rôle dans la transmission des savoirs et la communication visuelle, mais aussi l’histoire, l’archive et les collections, ou encore le numérique, les nouveaux médias et les modes complexes de visualisation qui leurs sont associés.

La cartographie de la recherche en design graphique fait alors apparaître six grands territoires, dont les frontières poreuses sont allègrement franchies par la plupart des projets et des chercheurs. Ce découpage est contingent, il offre un point de vue sur un état actuel de la recherche, un éclairage instantané sur ses quelques couleurs dominantes, que les projets mélangent en continu et dans des proportions variables.

Une telle cartographie est bien entendu construite sur des découpages discutables, présupposant les limites même de la carte, tracées entre recherche et pratique, entre graphisme et art ou design. Étrangers à toute ambition normative, ces choix sont à voir comme des points de départ, des pistes de discussion et de réflexion ouvertes sur les prolongements potentiels que la richesse du champ du design graphique laisse ici entrevoir."

texte par Vivien Philizot et Malte Martin

website

dans le media:
Atelier Malte Martin
magazine etapes
ligne de base
this is our work
vivienphilizot.com

commissariat: Vivien Philizot, Malte Martin
textes: Vivien Philizot
conception graphique: Vivien Philizot,
assisté par Michaël Mouyal, Julienne Richard
scénographie: Philippe Riehling
relecture et corrections: Charlotte Bomy
traduction Birgitt Sørensen
numérique: Juan Andres Gomez
coordination: Département Collection,
expositions et recherche du Signe

FAKE is an American independent publisher based in New York, founded by experimental artist Cristiano Grim, with a vision centered on disruption of meaning, transfiguration of forms, and awakening of the senses. The publisher creates hybrid publications combining photography, graphic design, underground music, and poetry into innovative formats: music compilations pressed on audiophile-quality vinyl with offset-printed zines.

FAKE features international artists including Parker Day, Braulio Amado, Stefano Lemon, Zach Hobbs, Jane Pain, Iphigenia Douleur, Jonathan Castro, Alessandro Adriani, Jordan Lieb, Antoni Maiovvi, Peaking Lights, Curses, and Alana O'Herlihy. Music is mastered by audio engineer Marco Antonio Spaventi, zines printed by SNEL in Belgium, vinyl pressed by Discomat, and distributed by Printed Matter (USA) and Sound Metaphors (EU).

As interaction designer and coder of the first version of the website, I contributed to creating digital infrastructure that supports this experimental publishing practice.

The only obstacle to perpetual printing is the entropy of the equipment. A stripped, dismantled HP DesignJet 500 inkjet printer reveals its inner nature – fragile, composed of motors, cables, and mechanical parts. The primary functions are reversed: instead of producing single pages, the machine operates in continuous loops, creating blurry prints on an 8m² motion screen.

Through hardware hacking, the paper management system, sensors, and cartridges are reprogrammed with custom software that defies industrial logic. A minimal algorithm fuels continuous action reduced to essentials: horizontal lines. Noise becomes line, line becomes sound, time transforms them into concrete music.

This machine performance generates perpetually-changing compositions through fragmented signs that print and overprint without pause. The work interrogates the temporal rhythms of industrial production, proposing circularity over efficiency and process over product.

Presented at Musée de Beaux-arts du Locle, Porto Design Biennale, and Weltformat Festival, this work contributes to discussions about post-digital materiality and critical making practices that reveal the hidden labor and temporalities embedded within everyday technologies.

Code repository

During a semester, I worked as a research intern in a research laboratory (Institute of Network Cultures) alongside Cristina Cochior (RO), and with the support of The Wikimedia Foundation Netherlands, we conducted experimental and exploratory research on the potential use of content from projects such as Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikidictionary, etc. in offline formats such as EPUB. During the 5 months of research, we interviewed artists about their uses of wikis: Anja Groten from Hackers & Designers, Femke Smelts from Constant, and Andre Castro from Piet Zwart. Some of them use wikis as a tool and others are interested in using them to make hybrid publications. We presented our research at the annual Wikimedia NL conference in Utrecht. We exposed in detail the findings of our research, and we presented the design of a prototype that is used to export content from wikis (HTML) to EPUB files. This research is still ongoing and we are developing it during our free time because we have received a lot of interest from the foundation and independent wikis. This research made me discover the world of experimental and hybrid publishing and made me aware of the issues facing its many actors.

A wiki dedicated to providing an overview of the key concepts in the extensive work of Donna Haraway.
The wiki was also complemented by a local Wi-Fi network attached to a dog that served as a hub for collaboratively exploring, during a day, the different "becoming with" modes in which humans collaborate with other species.

Website