Kortunefookie

Kortunefookie's Web site suggest users to send an innermost secret, a smarmiest wisecrack, a private prayer, or an outlandish prediction.

A challenge for the team was to render the complex technology used invisible, letting the experience generated by the device dominate (as describe by John Maeda, in his book The Laws of Simplicity, MIT Press, 2006).

Francis Boivin, then a visual arts student at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, greatly contributed to the making of the wooden sculpture.

Lastly, speakers were installed inside the fortune cookie so that a 10-second synthesized melody could be heard each time the button was pressed.

Statistics for the texts so far are: For its first showing at the Arts Under The Bridge Festival[3] in New York City (organized by Brooklyn artist-run centre DAC[4]), the project was entitled SensGoodKarma.

Several brainstorming sessions to find a new name proved fruitless until, one evening in 2009, Chris Zeke Hand exclaimed,[5] “Kortunefookie!”, inspiring the permanent name of the project.

Limited to 100 numbered editions, this publication includes texts, photographs, and illustrations by Jean-François Lacombe, François Chalifour, Christian Desjardins, Mamoru Kobayakawa, and Marie-Hélène Leblanc.

In all sorts of ways, Lacombe’s odd-looking box, lying by the side of the road outside an art gallery, speaks to us of a trend whose results remain, to this day, ambiguous.

Jean-François Lacombe is working on it.» Excerpt taken from the article Kortunefookie, Horro Vacui, written by François Chalifour, previously published in the magazine Espace Sculpture 90,[10] Hiver 2009/2010.