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thank you lights

Aaron Parsekian

My project is a battery made from scratch that powers a high efficiency LED. The goal is to embrace newest available lighting technology combined with materials that are normally discarded.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/aaron-parsekian

Description

Can something high tech be powered by trash? My design combines the newest LED technology currently available with a battery made of simple, often thrown away materials as its power source. I put these two elements together to create a portable lantern that is both a useful light and a source of recycling intrigue. This lantern hopefully demonstrates the broad scope of materials we have here on earth, both old and new, and combines them. I decided to try and create a power source out of paper, metal, plastic, and organic materials from the trash and then publish a construction guide to recreate it using simple household tools.

Classes

Basic Analog Circuits, Project Development Studio, Thesis

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Me, Myself and .io

Wipawe Sirikolkarn

Me, myself and .io is a projection-based augmented reality (AR) installation about who I am as seen through both my physical and digital data.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/ws1236

Description

It used to be said that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Well, I beg to differ. The internet knows exactly who you are. Our digital footprint is an ongoing record of our unfiltered desires and obsessions and is traceable by both us and the big corporates. While they are selling our data to advertisers and the government, I think there’s something I can do at a very personal level using the same data. Because even though Google knows me very well, it doesn’t care about me the way I do. Me, myself and .io serves as a way for me to better understand myself by retracing my digital footprints.

Classes

Thesis

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its_ok

Aaron Montoya-Moraga

its_ok is a collection of different performance art pieces, physical installations and the software specifically made for them.

http://montoyamoraga.io/its_ok/

Description

My project is called its_ok and is a series of both art pieces and software tools that I built. It includes web applications, terminal applications, websites, live performance tools, that I will demo in the show.

Classes

Reading and Writing Electronic Text, Thesis

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Closed Cells, Open Wounds

Sisa B. Holguín

CLOSED CELLS, OPEN WOUNDS is virtual reality documentary experience that aims to address the core issue to the mass incarceration crisis that is plaguing this country.

http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/bh376

Description

CLOSED CELLS, OPEN WOUNDS is virtual reality documentary experience that aims to address the core issue to the mass incarceration crisis that is plaguing this country. Much research shows that poor communities of color are becoming incarcerated at alarming rates for the past 30 years, and thereby resulting in a significant part of our population to be condemned to a vicious cycle of a lifetime of repeated arrests.

Many ask why is this the case? In this VR experience, we hear first hand from a young New Yorker, who was criminalized and incarcerated at age 16. By telling his story in VR, we will learn how both his community and jail are linked due to a lack of adequate help and reform from officials.

This story will be told by two siblings (a brother and a sister) who will appear in the experience and talk about their Harlem neighborhood, the older brother’s first arrest at, and how it impacted their family. This is an emotional conversation, filled with tough questions, self-reflection, and tears.

The aesthetics of this VR documentary film will appear to be of a minimalist look in black negative space. Their story will be told in deconstructed sections as the viewer travels down the hallway, creating symbolic metaphors of this damaging system.

The project is currently a work in progress, and will be completed within the coming months. The experience will eventually be enhanced by graphic effects and animations that will be added in the future. Some of the tools used to create this experience will be traditional filmmaking and photography, photogrammetry, Unreal Game Engine, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, and DepthKit.

CLOSED CELLS, OPEN WOUNDS is powerfully emotional experience that uses of a variety of artistic mediums to creative a living collage that communicates the destructive impact of this ongoing crisis in America.

Classes

Thesis, Worlds on a Wire: Narrative Storytelling in VR

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Here and There

Adi Wiedersheim Sendagorta

An immersive installation that explores the distortion of memory and the unstable processes of remembrance through photographs that come alive in response to the position of the onlooker.

Description

Here and There is an interactive installation that immerses the spectator in the world of abandoned and faded memories with distorted photographs that light up and trigger sound when the user 'selects' them with their hand. The project uses tracking devices and projection mapping to design an voyeur-like audiovisual experience that creates a sense of awe and nostalgia in the spectator and strives to connect them to their own memories.

Classes

Thesis

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Wave-washed Sand

Yuli Cai

Poems are written in words. But what stay with us are the emotions they provoke. Can I make a kinetic sculpture that can represent this inexpressible nature of one of my favourite poem?

http://www.caiyuli.com/work/wave-washed-sands-an-experience-with-an-ancient-chinese-poem/

Description

Wave-washed Sands is an experience centered on a kinetic balloon sculpture based on an ancient Chinese poem, designed to bring a universal communication space for all people no matter what language they speak. The selected poem, Wave-washed Sands (Lang Tao Sha) by Li Yu, describes the poet’s feeling of both loss and acceptance at the same time. He was the last emperor of his dynasty, imprisoned in his enemy’s land. This kinetic sculpture experience, is written in motors, balloons and code, performs different phases of the poem emphasizing the feeling of exile. I believe no matter what culture we come from, there is a powerful commonality in all humankind, and that is what I wanted to explore with this project. Wave-washed Sands was made by mixing and crafting people’s impressions together and baking them into features and movements of my kinetic sculpture.

Classes

Thesis

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WAVE

Kritchaya Twitchsri

A device that is tuning your mind down before bed

Description

WAVE is a device that helps you to sleep better using scent and light animation. It takes you to a breathing exercise so you can shift your focus from other distractions and put your phone down. It comes with a mobile application so you can adjust your preferences and record your progress for a good night sleep.

Classes

Thesis

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diy/gyn

Zoe Bachman

DIY/GYN is how women in the near future hack their access to health care. Using tongue-in-cheek language, speculative thinking and emerging technology, DIY/GYN calls attention to precarious futures in the United States and reflects on what this potential situation means for us in the present.

http://diy-gyn.net

Description

At a time when technology creeps closer to science fiction, the news has a tone more similar to dystopia. DIY/GYN takes the role of imagination in relation to social justice as its starting point and explores how fantasies of the future can help us deal with our present realities.

Since Trump's election, we live in a time where things could change at any moment – bans, deportations, and other executive orders are frequent actions with life-altering (and threatening) ramifications. The project takes the current issues surrounding women’s health at its starting point – the closure of Planned Parenthood in Texas and potential loss of federal funding, the re-implementation of anti-abortion policies. We talk about these things possibly happening, but what does lack of access really look like? This project attempts to materialize and make real possible future scenarios in a way that feels familiar, yet strangely off.

Speculative narratives and futurist projects create space for alternative structures and a way to question our current practices. Similarly, DIY methodology finds agency outside of institutions, promotes alternative narratives for how the world can work, and provides human solutions to precarious situations. There’s a long history of alternative, specifically female medical practices and while some provide important alternatives to clinical care, more often they are stop-gap measures to solve issues of access to medical resources. After years of advancement in reproductive and sexual health worldwide, things might soon get worse in the US. Planned parenthood might be defunded and Roe vs. Wade could be overturned. However, these issues are still framed as a “female” problem and do not take into consideration their impact on all aspects of society.

DIY/GYN is set in a future world where Planned Parenthood has been defunded and many centers have closed. This is not far fetched – when Texas voted to close PP, only 10% of patients have transferred to other clinics. This begs the question, what are the other 90% doing to take care of their health?

DIY/GYN imagines that women take advantage of relatively inexpensive electronic components and everyday objects to find solutions to their gynecological health care problems. As this information is considered dangerous and prior resources unavailable, they source their knowledge and pills from a website on the darkweb: diy-gyn.info. The site is a cross between Silk Road and Rookie, Our Bodies Ourselves and Instructables. It teaches people how to take care of themselves, how to build tools to manage their health and how to smuggle in birth control pills from Canada (or set them up with a supplier).

I’ve focused on building out four pieces to illustrate my concept: the diy-gyn website (also hosted as an actual tor site), the porTORble purse router, the selfie-cervical-exam-stick, and the the Boob Tube smart bra. The objects use emerging forms of technology like IoT, bluetooth, raspberry pi, and wearables and familiar objects such as bras. As a set, they pull from current makerspace culture and playful feminism while assessing future needs and dangers that might arise from the erasure of planned parenthood and the criminalization of abortion.

Classes

Thesis

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Willo

Emmanuel Y Klein

Willo is a chatbot which uses a conversational interface to engage children in an open-ended exploration of the world.

Description

Willo is a chatbot which uses a conversational interface to engage children in an open-ended exploration of the world. Willo asks questions about natural phenomena and encourages children to develop possible solutions based on their own ideas and experiences.

Classes

Thesis

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The Periodical

Olivia Cueva

The Periodical is a period subscription service that aims to change the way we experience our period holistically, making it celebratory, inclusive of all bodies who menstruate, while promoting safer products for our bodies and the planet. <br />

Description

Menstruation is happening all around us. Yet society treats menstrual periods as a burden, something to feel ashamed of, and something we must pay for. It has been calculated that people can spend upwards of $40 per month on their periods alone, which includes tampons/pads, new underwear, chocolate, tea, heating pads, and a variety of other products we use during that time of the month. But what if people could get everything they needed, including treats and self care products, delivered to their door every month for an affordable price? The Periodical aims to do just that. It is a customizable period subscription service that delivers the products you use, as well as samples of safer alternatives to cater to your individual period needs.

Classes

Thesis