The Paris chapter of Creative Mornings had been dormant since the pandemic (as far as I know), so I was happily surprised when I found out it was recently taken over by a new group of people, I’m joining in to support them.
CreativeMornings exceptionally took place in the evening yesterday, the speaker was Benjamin Gaulon, an artist, researcher, and I’d say tinkerer extraordinaire.
I raised my hand to look for sponsors for event series (j’écrirais sans doute un post en français à ce propos bientôt, mais n’hésitez pas si jamais vous voulez discuter de devenir sponsor pour Creative Mornings Paris).
I’m sure strategists and other Venn diagram geeks will appreciate Ben’s “unifying theory” diagram that came towards the end of his talk, as he pondered the relationships between his art projects and teaching workshops.\
Ben began by telling us he grew up in a small village in France that happened to be right next to a open air dump, and that was his favorite place to play and explore, digging up treasure out of the dirt.
A description copied from his website, Recyclism: “His research focuses on the limits and failures of information and communication technologies; planned obsolescence, consumerism and disposable society; ownership and privacy; through the exploration of détournement, hacking and recycling.”
Recyclism: https://www.recyclism.com/
My main takeaway from his talk is that to criticize, you best first understand, and that happens as much through tinkering as it does through theorizing (or perhaps more).
Ben pulls all sorts things apart from other people’s electronic waste and teaches students how to work with, hack, experiment, as well as critically think about electronics, digital devices, our use of them, and a lot more.
He started NØ and the NØ School in Nevers (Burgundy), a collective and summer school to understand and critically discuss electronics and communication technologies.
NØ Collective https://www.nowebsite.org/
NØ School Nevers https://www.noschoolnevers.com/
I enjoyed hearing about all the projects I worked on, from The Internet of Dead Things to Tech Mining and Retail Poisoning, his websites are definitely worth checking out.
Because I remember playing with them as a kid, special mention to his rehabilitating a collection of Minitels to set them up as a simili Apple/Minitels store for people to experiment with.
In case you don’t know, the Minitel was the French government’s first digital communication network, and there were terminal screens in many homes, with proto websites people could visit, and use to find information, chat with other people by text, play games, etc.
The next Creative Mornings Paris talk is on Friday 19th July, and the monthly theme is ‘trust’ – sign up here: https://creativemornings.com/cities/prs
Thanks to Frédéric Bussière, Catherine Erneux, and the others for putting this up!
