sensingnearby.org
Website for the writings and broadcasts of Joachim Ben Yakoub.
those.tools is a software development and design studio for research, editorial and publishing practices in the arts and social sciences. We develop free and open source tools for writing, archiving, mapping, designing and publishing research.
We activate and adapt each tool to the context of every project we collaborate on. Wether for self-initiated projects or commissioned work, our aim is to explore new ways of doing things, recognizing the epistemological function of tools with a strong focus on collective creative processes.
These processes can produce a variety of objects: books, web platforms, sound installations… They may also, we hope, produce new ideas, new perspectives, new relations.
Open to collaborations, those.tools welcomes fellow designers, developpers, artists with an interest in these topics.
Chemins a data archiving and mapping tool. Built on top of the Processwire CMS, it enables one or more users to build up a database of documents, specifying object typologies and relationships, while graphically visualizing these documents within a map. The resulting database can be used to produce a website, with each node and link in the graph constituting a web page.
Marginalia a writing tool for creating relationships between several columns of text. It can be used to write linear text containing calls for notes, as well as multi-voice dialogues. It includes an export module for designing a printed publication from the encoded content.
Pibliotheque a files sharing system between computers connected to a local network, designed for collective practices of documents sharing and dissemination.
Website for the writings and broadcasts of Joachim Ben Yakoub.
Two days workshop at Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)
On September 20 and 21, I've had the opportunity to participate to a workshop at Varia (Rotterdam) dedicated to Pibliotheque, a tool I initially created for the Digital Design class at ERG (Brussels), where I teach together with Alexia Devischer. Alexia has been involved for the last two years in a research project called Les nouveaux habits du colportage with Alice Néron and Léonard Mabille. They invited me with Simon Browne from Varia to this workshop to test Pibliotheque and to talk about book sharing practices in local contexts.
Pibliotheque is peer-to-peer software that allows users to exchange documents within a local network and also to build a collective library containing all the documents on the network. This collective library is displayed in different ways depending on the computers connected: each computer can offer a different interface.
During the two-day workshop, we were able to share documents, propose interface ideas, develop modules for importing documents into Pibliotheque from other sources like Zotero (thank you Danny), and discuss potential new features.
Website and publishing platform for the Commodity Frontiers initiative.
Design and development of the website bna-bbot.be/soundmap.
Database architecture for the a/r initiative
First waves of Maghrebi and Black struggles in Brussels, and beyond.
Map of the connections between the individual research projects in the context of the exhibition "Branching Streams. Sketches of Kinship" by the international research team Reconnecting 'objects' (reconnecting.art) at Théodore Monod African Art Museum, Dakar. The map was designed and hand drawn by Ayoh Kré Duchâtelet and Lionel Maes.
A website for the research project Simba Mbili by Sam Hopkins and Marian Nur Goni.
Introduction to the writing tool Marginalia in the context of the "Networked Practice" seminar organized by Sam Hopkins at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
A database for the archival practice of Peliskan, an association dedicated to the rescuing of Super 8 Films, notably in connection with the "festival Super 8" in Belgium