Julien Deswaef
Interviewed in
Tell us a little about what you do
I’m an artist, designer and creative coder. I usually make video pipelines and unidentified web objects. I basically like anything that involves mashups and that can be manipulated with code.
Apart from some binary blobs here and there, my toolbox is composed only of free/libre open source software. This is necessary for my work as it corresponds to the ethics and philosophy I enjoy in the digital world as much as it gives me the freedom to do whatever I want with those tools. So it’s both a way to see life, authorship and collaboration as it is a practical way to build things.
Lately I’ve been studying ways to improve collaboration between graphic designers and plan to turn the many ideas I have around this into a usable tool. I also collect laptops covered with stickers, references of abuse and empathy with robots and run my own NYCmesh node.
Which tech trend(s) are getting the most of your attention right now?
I’ve always been interested in distributed technologies… from file sharing to messaging and nowadays digital “currencies”.
It’s {how|why} internet was built and although it looks like a dying idea sometimes, there always new stuff popping up.
So I keep a eye on:
Which blogs or zines do you peruse right now?
I have an RSS reader with ~200 feeds. But my latest favorites are: