PRISMATIME

Melissa Felderman

PRISMATIME is a product that expresses time using ambient colored light.

http://prismatime.com

Description

PRISMATIME is a product that expresses time using ambient colored light. Through fluid color changes, this timekeeping system attempts to ease our tense relationship with time, and maybe help us feel less enslaved by the clock.

Classes

Thesis

restage

Stream Gao

How a computer seeks, interprets internet dance and represents them as an artistic form, a form you can just get, not process.

http://restage.streamgao.com

Description

ReStage provides a new perspective of finding and looking at dance. It generates meta media for dance using web crawling, natural language processing and searching. Then represents these meta media by remixing them into different artistic forms.

Classes

Thesis

Flickering Existence

Chang Liu

Flickering Existence is an artwork that includes a series of portraits generated by a computational portraiture tool developed by Chang Liu that facilitates an intimate experience between a participant and the machine.<br />

http://www.liuchangitp.com/portfolio/flickering-existence/

Description

Flickering Existence is a multi-platform art work that seeks to create an intimate experience between participants and a portraiture engine that generates portraits. The final portraits are collected into a book with personal annotations by the artist.
Each portrait is captured by a camera that acts as the ‘painter’s eyes’. An algorithm serves as the ‘painter’s brush’. Both work together to create an abstraction that emerges into a human form. The final state of the portrait is determined by me, the artist.
With these new computations tools, I hope to capture the specific moment, personality and emotion both of the subjects and me. The portrait’s generation involved music, movement, writing, posture and conversations throughout the process.

Classes

Thesis

Anxiety

Aaron Montoya-Moraga, Eve J Weinberg

An online 360-audio experience, where the user is invited to hear the anxious thoughts inside the artist's brain and turn them off.

http://anxietybrain.net/

Description

‘Anxiety.’ is a 360 web musical experience. The user is invited into the brain of an anxious artist, to hear the inner-most thoughts, represented as a 6-part harmony placed in a 360 space. Navigating the 3D space, the user can turn the thoughts on and off. Each thought is sung and accompanied by ambient sounds — heartbeat and percussion sounds.

Classes

Computational Portraiture, Interactive Music

Call Me Refugee

Magdalena Kovarik

A mixed media VR documentary collage about a young man that escaped from Syria – this is the narrative of a transition: the unique story of a person who became 'a refugee'.

http://www.magdalenakovarik.com/callmerefugee

Description

Call Me Refugee is a mixed media VR documentary about a young man that escaped from Syria. This is the narrative of a transition – the unique story of a person who became 'a refugee'. The conversation is carried through a collage of images, videos and virtual moments. It is an artistic as well as a journalistic narrative that aims to break through people’s numbness for information and human tragedy. By telling the unique story of Salah, a twenty-five year old man from Aleppo, I hope to humanize humans and fight against the objectification of individuals affected by the current refugee crisis. Over many hours of Skype, Whatsapp and email, Salah told me his story of a long journey that carried him over seven borders, many asylums and a loss of identity. “Now we all have the same name: Refugee” he once told me. Listening to the conversation between two strangers that became friends, the audience wanders through a collage of popping up emails, personal and historic photographs, maps and 3D models. This project is the portray of a person, as well as a story about our globalized world. Where two people meet between the internet and reality.

What makes this project particularly interesting in a VR environment is the spatial possibilities that it offers. It is a dialog between two people that are far away from each other. Locating them on two different sides while keeping the viewer in the middle, this aspect of location and distance can get experienced. The space between the two of them is filled by the story with it’s pictures, videos and maps. In this virtual world emails pop up and the flat sunset on the Skype screen turns into a 360° video of a sunset behind the New York Skyline. 3D scans show the two ends of the internet: my desk and my view inside this computer, inside his world, and his desk, his perspective.

Classes

Thesis

streaming souls

David Cihelna

Streaming souls is a live 360 video performance that connects the audience to the performance space in real time.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2016/project/david-cihelna

Description

Streaming Souls is a short experimental performance streamed live in 360 degrees. The performance space was a 4 wall video projection box built at CultureHub NYC. The audience could impact the performance projections in real time, abstracting and offsetting the cohesion of the videos streamed back at them. Streaming souls explores new ways in which we can share spaces by creating a direct connection to the using 360 streaming. 360 video can translate one space to another, giving the audience direct access to a remote location, and in the process places gravity on human connection rather than entertaining isolation. The project is built on top of a custom 360 web player I built, which is now adapted into a live 360 platform called svrround.

Classes

Thesis, Prototyping Movies

The Sound Level Sign

Jesse Horwitz

A polite way of saying STFU.

http://11bsouth.com/?p=321

Description

The Sound Level Sign demonstrates a fun, low cost solution to a growing urban problem. As the level of disruptive noise increases The Sound Level Sign will bear an increasingly disgruntled face and a disapproving message to drivers. By framing the issue as an information problem (in the vein of the “Your speed is…” signs) The Sound Level Sign will reduce local noise pollution without the need for further government regulation, police enforcement, or expensive sound insulation. In addition, The Sound Level Sign can run on solar and battery power which makes it easy to install and operate off the grid.

Classes

Energy

plastic in paradisum

Rebecca Ricks

plastic in paradisum is a creative interrogation of the social processes that confer value on the objects that surround us.

http://cargocollective.com/plastic-in-paradisum

Description

The project is a digital, interactive archive of plastic objects I found washed up on the beach at Dead Horse Bay. I collected, photographed, researched, and created 3D models of the plastic objects, which can be viewed on the project website.

The poet A.R. Ammons once remarked that maybe garbage was the sacred image of our time. I'm interested in the images and rituals of consumption and how cultural attitudes toward waste have resulted in an ocean threatened by a plastic soup.

Classes

Temporary Expert: Design + Science in the Anthropocene

Dope Engineering + Math Tales

Tanya Campbell

Dope Engineering + Math Tales is an effort to make STEM content entertaining, interactive, approachable and resourceful for underserved students.

http://www.tanyacampbell.space/#/demtales/

Description

Dope Engineering + Math Tales (DEM Tales) is an interactive, animated, STEM enriched mobile platform. DEM Tales is a call-to-action project to give support and an alternative curriculum to underserved students.

Underserved students attend schools that lack extra resources, quality teachers and funding. This results in students not achieving academic milestones compared to students at private schools. Underserved students usually need more support and guidance to achieve these academic milestones. DEM Tales is an effort to provide a resource to these types of students at their convenience, and make a difference in their lives.

DEM Tales contains a collection of animated episodes. These episodes present STEM content in a mixture of popular colloquialisms and interaction. Users are held accountable if they wish to reach the conclusions of each episode. For example, if the user is watching an episode, it will pause at a certain point. The user will be prompted to drag and drop an item to a designated portion on the screen. The episode will not continue until this action is performed.

Classes

Thesis

Narrated Reality

Ross Goodwin

A camera, a compass, and a clock that generate stories using LSTM recurrent neural networks based on images, time, and location respectively

https://medium.com/@rossgoodwin/adventures-in-narrated-reality-6516ff395ba3

Description

Narrated Reality is my ITP thesis, a collection of machine intelligence “narrators” that produce poetry and prose based on their environments. The three devices I am creating will be a camera, a compass, and a clock that generate text based on images, location, and time respectively. The text in each case will be printed on large format thermal printers as the devices narrate their environments in real time.

To power the devices' generative capacity, I am training a number of LSTM recurrent neural network models on NYU's supercomputer cluster. However, I will require staging space to complete the physical devices.

I have been constantly fascinated by the possibilities of machines that can learn, and more so by the prospect of tools that could serve to augment our creative capacity. I imagine a future where I can produce a cohesive, textual story by compiling a series of related photographs, or by taking a long walk in my city, and I want to see those possibilities realized. Moreover, as a photographer and a writer, I want to combine two of my favorite mediums in way that redefines each experience as it creates one that's entirely new.

For XStory: I will be screening a film I made with Oscar Sharp, from a screenplay generated with the same LSTM technology that powers the three device: https://vimeo.com/165547246 (password: sunspring)

Classes

Thesis