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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.

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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.

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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.

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Thesis

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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

Thesis Presentation Video

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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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Thesis

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Unfinished

Ying He, Yen-An Chen

Override the standard new tab page with a random unfinished artwork from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online collection

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unfinished/jaflockmdgfoehjilcemkmfaogfpcofp

Description

This chrome extension deals with the premier show of the new MET Breuer building. The works displayed in this exhibition are unfinished works by artists from all over the world.

Classes

Thesis, Networked Media

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Wonder Corner

Ruta Kruliauskaite

Wonder Corner is a participatory installation that invites adults into a private and safe space to wonder about the world. It is a place where no one can see or hear them and they can ask anything they want.

http://wondercorner.space/

Description

Seymour Papert said, “Learning, especially today … is about putting one’s own words to the world, or finding one’s own voice, and exchanging our ideas with others.”

Research shows that compared to children adults are less likely to seek out help, share and ask questions about things they don’t know. Somewhere along the way of growing up, we lose the openness of our former curiosity. We think we’re supposed to have all the answers and we become embarrassed about what we don’t know.

Wonder Corner is an invitation to leave that shame behind.

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Trini Talk

Nikita Huggins

Trini Talk is an online platform designed to communicate and preserve the Trinidad English Creole Language. Using an interactive web platform, Trini Talk teaches the oral language of Trinidad through the island’s history, shows how the language is used and establishes a platform to preserve the language.

http://nikitahuggins.com/Thesis/TriniTalk/index.html

Description

Trini Talk, is a web platform designed to communicate the Trinidad English Creole Language. The platform uses an API of the dialect to teach this oral language through an interactive visualization. Video showcases real-life situations in the language usage. The language is evolving as new vocabulary is being spoken, so Trini Talk includes a platform to gather these new additions to the dialect from nationals. This is a preliminary effort to digitally preserve the evolving language.

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Social Assemblages

Rebecca Ricks

Social Assemblages is a collection of distinct projects that speculates as to how Facebook data might be collected and analyzed by third parties in the future. "Eigenfaces" and "Logged in from" are the two projects on display.

http://rebecca-ricks.com/facebook

Description

It has been well documented that Facebook’s human facial recognition model can predict the identity of a face with over 99 percent accuracy. For my project “Eigenfaces”, I digitally printed a linen jacket with a pattern of images containing my eigenfaces threshold numbers alongside a 3D image of my face. By taking my private biometric data and literally wearing it on my sleeve, I wanted to encourage Facebook users to think about the degree to which their biometric data is already public. With my project “Logged in from”, I attempted to re-insert the digital world into the physical world by locating specific actions I took on Facebook within a physical geography. Using the location metadata associated with my Facebook activity, I reconstructed the real physical geography of each location in a three-dimensional environment, producing a series of strange, imaginary landscapes.

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Thesis