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Light scapes

Shir David

Light scapes is a series of 3d sculptures inspired by lowlight photography.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/shir-david

Description

Light was used in the past to bridge over long distance communications, through chains of bonfires that were lit on top of mountains. A light house signals a safe shoreline to passing ships. Now, we use optical fibers to carry light and illuminate our cities. A glowing screen is last thing that we see as we drift to sleep, and the first thing we wake up to in the morning. Our light is our communicator; turned on means awake, alive, turned off is asleep, closed, out of power.

In Light Scapes, I used volumetric photography to create a series of three 3D sculptures that explore the relationship we have with light. A neon sign that washes the street in pink light, a television that unites people around its glow, a man opening a fridge in the middle of the night.

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Geode #1 (Fun House)

Jared D Friedman

Geode #1 is a space for solitary contemplation and reflection on the body and the self, in the form of a seven-foot-wide inside-out disco ball that you can climb into.

https://www.jared-friedman.com/portfolio/geode-1-fun-house/

Description

It takes the form of a geodesic sphere, seven feet in diameter, mounted on a short wooden platform, with a small door near the bottom. The viewer enters through the door, and sits down on a cushion on the floor, and the door shuts. And everything is completely dark.

After a short time, there is a flash of light, and all surfaces inside are revealed as mirrors – there is no fixed point, except for one’s own body, and in that moment, the viewer becomes the only real and defined thing he or she can visually perceive.

And then it’s dark again, and the lighting begins to respond to the viewer’s body, dimming and brightening with movement and stillness to transform space, hide and reveal the body, and encourage both exploration and contemplation.

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Drawing Feelings

Ondina E Frate

Drawing Feelings is an analog data visualization that tells the story of my every day emotions through daily drawings of objects that represent my feelings.

http://drawingfeelings.com/

Description

Drawing Feelings is a personal journey of finding my inside and outside worlds. Objects that influenced my day are drawn on paper every night for 30 days, then traced in Illustrator, and animated on the web in a way that conveys a story. The story I’m telling dates from Feb 19th to March 20th 2017.

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Museum of Mistrust

Lindsey Johnson

Museum of Mistrust is an interactive museum about the history and effects of con artists. It allows users to experience confidence tricks first hand to allow the user to understand how it could happen to them in the real world.

Description

The Museum of Mistrust is an interactive museum that teaches visitors about con artists. The visitors will learn about the history of cons, what is considered a con compared to other crimes and the professional con artists that made them happen. The museum is also a place where people can experience different confidence tricks first hand. Some will be direct cons where the visitor is aware that there are a part of while others will be cons that are less apparent and the users will just have to see if they have the skills to figure it out. How they are affected by each con will be tracked using RFID cards that are given to them at the beginning. This museum is meant to give a full experience of con artists to give the visitor more awareness of what can happen and know that everyone can be a mark.

This project would show the concepts using video and physical items.

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The Radius Project

Jesse Horwitz

A device that measures experienced population density with WiFi.

http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/jah840

Description

The Radius Project is a first step toward documenting and visualizing population density as expressed through digital communications devices. The Radius device listens for WiFi signals that are broadcasted by smartphones and laptop computers to create an estimate of its surrounding population density. When these data are recorded the result is a new type of population metric called “experienced density”. This experienced density metric can be used to quantify otherwise vague constructs like “crowded” or “busy” in a systematic way. While radius is active, it records experienced density along with current GPS location and time. These density data are then exported in a standard CSV format readable by most mapping, data visualization, and statistics platforms. With Radius, individual users can generate unique census-style datasets, revealing patterns within places, populations, and even their own social life.

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Thesis Presentation Video

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Record in Flow

Serena M Parr

An interactive video installation exploring the site where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies camped in protest of the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline in North Dakota.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2017/project/smp694

Description

The projected video installation rotates through a queue of 360 degree videos I recorded at Standing Rock, along with rectangular and 360 video clips submitted by any number of Native American contributors who recorded video at Standing Rock. Taken together, this flow of recorded perspectives is meant to offer a sense of place and the people who occupied it.

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RAT TALE

Gal Nissim

Rat Tale is an immersive experience that aims to evoke emotions in the liminal zone of disgust and attraction. By creating physical closeness between rats and humans, it raises questions regarding the way we perceive animals who share the urban habitat with us.

galnissim.com

Description

We live in an urban environment that we designed for ourselves, but we are not the only ones living here. Often, we consider city animals as interlopers in our space. However, the urban nature is a habitat for many different animals such as pigeons, cockroaches and rats. These are synanthropic animals, live and thrive close to humans. In my thesis, I have chosen to focus on our complex relationships with the prominent of all – the rat.

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A Cloud In Blue Sky

Corbin Ordel

A Cloud In Blue Sky is a interactive web platform that combines digital images, computer vision, machine learning, and text analysis to re-contextualize the vast and ever increasing world-wide catalogue self created digital media.

https://youtu.be/5jfDnPm4J5Y

Description

A Cloud In Blue Sky is a interactive web platform that combines digital images, computer vision, machine learning, and text analysis to re-contextualize the vast and ever increasing world-wide catalogue self created digital media.

The web interface allows users to upload their own personal images to be analyzed and annotated by a computer vision system called Densecap. This open source software has been to hacked to allow the computer vision created annotations to be corrected, argued against and grown through additional information provided by a human participant. This process will then create new captions that have been influenced and infused with the experiences and considerations of a human viewer. By re-composing and re-rendering our digital image catalogues in this way, I hope to broaden their meaning and backstory through an intentional meditation on the various moments we capture. I believe in doing so we can broaden the scope of understanding regarding the vast spectrum of realities that exist within the context of the everyday human experience will. A Cloud In Blue Sky has been created as an experimental web platform that uses machine learning as a tool to engage our collection of personal digital images in a reflexive manner.

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The Best Art

Nicole He

The Best Art is an artistic collaboration between the computer (MacBook Air, 13-inch, early 2015), and the human (Nicole He).<br />
The computer queries the universe and uses an algorithm to objectively calculate the best art for any given moment in time. The human executes the commands.

http://the-best-art

Description

The Best Art is a project about algorithmic objectivity, computational creativity, and the promises and failings of artificial intelligence. With techno-utopian promises made in Silicon Valley, it’s easy to conflate the ability to do things programmatically with objectivity. Because of that, we often deflect responsibility of an algorithm's output onto the machine, rather than the person or people who programmed it. The Best Art pokes at this idea that algorithms are objective just because they do things computationally.

Over a period of 6 weeks, a new artwork is posted every other day to http://the-best-art.computer, showing both the computer’s creative concept (e.g. “1490239696: Produce a domestic surveillance that feels blank”), and the human’s output (e.g. a picture of a webcam facing a wall). Each artwork is timestamped, distilling a variety of factors in the world into the “best” artistic concept to create for that specific moment.

For the ITP show, visitors will be able to receive and take home their own unique printed commands from the computer.

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Play:Connected

Jason Beck

We develop socially and emotionally through play, but for children with disabilities, opportunities for play can be hindered through hospitalizations and extended separation from friends and family. Play:Connected employs connected devices to foster play for children with disabilities through real-time streaming video and internet controlled toys.

http://www.jasonbeck.info/playconnected/

Description

For children with disabilities in medical facilities, the Internet offers a connection to the lives of parents, siblings, and friends. Though their bodies might not be able to inhabit the same place, they can still play through the networks that connect people with a wider world.

Play: Connected features an internet controlled rover streaming video and audio to a child in a remote medical facility. Built from various microcontrollers, motors, and electronic components, the rover senses and responds to play with other children. In its current iteration, the rover engages other children via a foam-dart turret mounted on the device and activated by the child remotely. Others can retaliate via a sensor embedded in another foam-dart gun. When fired at the rover, the sensor activates a turret in the remote child’s room, discharging foam darts at him or her.

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