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A Fresh View, a look into the Cyprus Problem

Ariana Vassilopoulou

A 360 Video installation that simulates the division of Cyprus, and shows the perspectives of the two communities – The Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

www.arianavassilopoulou.com

Description

A Fresh View is an installation that places two viewfinders facing each other, separated by a what is known as a Green Line. Each viewfinder represents the perspective of two communities in Cyprus; The Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Each viewfinder is created by putting the google cardboard into them, showing the Green Line from each side in 360 degrees. I conducted interviews and created the 360 videos in Cyprus, and learned how people on both sides feel about the separation of the country, and how the physicality of the Green Line affects their daily lives. This is what is shown inside of these viewfinders.

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Thesis

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IMVII

Brandon Kader

I created a system to seamlessly integrate music, visuals, and depth sensory data to perform as a conductor. The performer moves in a space to conduct music samples and generative visuals.

https://www.brandonkader.com/thesis

Description

I made an immersive experience without a device or VR headset. I have tried a VR headset and felt disoriented and extremely uncomfortable. I most definitely do not want to work in that medium. It is important that the performer not touch things like a conductor does not play a specific instrument in an orchestra, rather directs the performance. My experience with piano performance is that it is not very physically moving, the piano is stationary and the performer is seated at the keyboard. There is little showmanship or stage presence. I have felt the need to perform my music in another way. I explored how to make an immersive experience – including music and visual effects – using a touch free interface for modern composers to perform room scale installations. I used a Kinect camera to gather depth sensory data with Processing to map music and generative visuals in a system I built with Max MSP Jitter, a visual programming language that patches and connects the data to music and visual elements. I used a Triplehead2go for 3 projector display to create a room-scale visual experience.

Classes

Algorithmic Composition, Choreographic Interventions, Thesis

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mltk: machine listening toolkit

Michael Simpson

Sound is a multiplicity of qualities and features. What if a tool allowed us to easily extract and use more of these data points in real-time?<br />
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The <i>Machine Listening Toolkit</i> is a project aimed at easing the use of computational audition for creative purposes.

http://mltk.mgs.nyc/

Description

The Machine Listening Toolkit is a software toolkit for streamlining the use of machine listening algorithms. The toolkit was designed to be used in real-time applications and provides access to utilities and data structures that help alleviate the related burdens. MLTK currently includes an openFrameworks add-on, a collection of learning resources, and a standalone tool that can be used to visually explore representations of the data and data flows.

The dashboard allows users to select, configure, and explore a vast array of relevant algorithms and have their output rendered in real-time as a graphic visualization. The dashboard can display a matrix of real-time visualizations which the user can arrange freely. The simultaneous view allows differences between graphs to become apparent and observed. This is useful as a way of better understanding the algorithms and their relationships to each other but also provides a real-time indication of how the algorithms perform and seem most appropriate for a certain task given the sound. The graphs can individually be explored in 3D to help reveal historical trends in the data visually. Visualizations can be selected on-the-fly to make their data stream available to external applications using OSC. Data can also be exported into flat files in several common data file formats.

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Thesis

Thesis Presentation Video

http://mltk.mgs.nyc/

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Philosophycal / Feel-oh-so-fickle

Utsav Chadha

Can we use art and technology to reinterpret the process of reading philosophy, and construct it into a conversational interactive experience?

https://www.utsav-chadha.com/thesis

Description

Philosophycal is a web and voice-based experimental project that can be used to translate lengthy works of philosophy into conversational experiences. Conceptually, it creates a real-time dialogue between philosophical books and a participant. Technically, the project uses existing corpuses of philosophy to conduct text analysis in order to simulate an interactive context-driven conversation.

Classes

Thesis

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The Nude Museum

Oriana Neidecker

The Nude Museum is a series of curated interactive virtual reality exhibitions that showcase a private collection of nude photography in the desert, on mars, and in a gallery setting.

Description

The Nude Museum is an exploration into how we can view and engage with art that is not physically displayed. Whether it is art in a private collection or in a museum’s storage, the reality is that most art lives in boxes and in warehouses. Virtual reality provides an experience of viewing the art itself that lies somewhere between seeing it in person and seeing it as a jpeg on a 2D screen.

The Nude Museum is a prototype that is part tool/part art piece that places a curated exhibition of a private collection of nude photography in various environments in virtual reality. It adds an otherworldly layer where the photos are curated with their environment and the experience is interactive.

Approaching a photo triggers an audio story about the piece, by the artist, their gallerist or from someone knowledgeable about it. It emulates the feeling of hearing about a piece from somebody first hand. Its conversational tone creates an enhanced viewing experience that makes the art more accessible and allows the viewer to connect on a deeper level with the work through stories. It is informative and surreal.

You have the opportunity to get closer to the art and really study it in a way that isn’t possible in a real museum. There are three different exhibitions of the collection in The Nude Museum, one in the desert, one on Mars, and one in a traditional museum setting.

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Thesis

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Jamais Vu

Danni Huang

Jamais Vu is a serial virtual reality experience consisting of repetitive loops, inspired some of my own recurring dreams.<br />

dannnni.com

Description

Jamais Vu is an experimental virtual reality meditation. It consists of repetitive loops that are inspired by dreams. Drawing on the surrealist approach, it aims to provide a rich metaphorical representation of our unconscious by transporting the looping feeling so common in our dreams into the waking world.

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Thesis

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Mtindo

Koji Kanao

'Mtindo' is a style transfer application for the desktop that offers non-technical people a unique opportunity to experience machine learning in action that explores some of the practical potentials of style transfer, beyond the game-like applications that are currently available. 'Mtindo' means style in Swahili<br /><br /><br />
I've often wondered what a self-portrait drawn by Van Gogh in the style of Picasso might look like and how I'd feel about it. Obviously, this never happened because Van Gogh died in 1890 when Picasso was just nine years old so we will never know for sure. Van Gogh never had a chance to see Picasso's art. Today, however, with texture synthesis techniques developed by Gatys et al. we have the potential to come close to simulating this possibility. We can combine an image created in one style with an image created in a different style to generate a new image with the content of the first image, but the style of the second. In this way, with style-transfer techniques, we can make a self-portrait painted by Van Gogh, Picasso-ish.

https://mtindo.ml

Description

What kinds of practical style transfer applications can be developed for non-technical people, such as creative professionals, that are easy to use, efficient, and push beyond the limits of what is currently possible with existing graphics tools? People think that machine learning requires a Ph.D./CS degree and a background in mathematics and statistics. It all sounds very complicated and difficult.

Unfortunately, machine learning isn’t easy to learn, but using applications designed with non-technical people in mind isn’t so hard and can be a lot of fun. Style transfer, which is the technique of recomposing images in the style of other images, is one form of machine learning that has started to be made available online to the general public through simple games.

Mtindo is a style transfer application for the desktop that offers non-technical people a unique opportunity to experience machine learning in action that explores some of the practical potentials of style transfer, beyond the game-like applications that are currently available. Mtindo means style in Swahili.

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Thesis

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Breathe With Me

Samantha Schulman

Breathe With Me is a wearable t-shirt that leverages the expansion and compression of pneumatics to encourage the wearer to focus on and control their breathing during moments of panic and anxiety.

https://www.samanthaschulman.com/2018/04/17/breathe-with-me/

Description

Anxiety disorders affect more than 40 million Americans, many of whom suffer from panic attacks. Panic attacks are unpredictable, debilitating episodes typically characterized by shaking, chest tightness, difficulty breathing, and intense fear. The combination of fear and physiological symptoms continues to heighten one another, escalating the panic attack. Paralyzed with fear, one’s breathing becomes short and shallow. While some strategies for coping with anxiety involve meditation or medication, I want to offer a new solution, one that transforms the anti-anxiety techniques of both diaphragmatic breathing and applied deep body pressure into a garment that could be worn anywhere.

The result, Breathe With Me, is is a wearable t-shirt that leverages the expansion and compression of pneumatics to encourage the wearer to focus on and control their breathing during moments of panic and anxiety. The user squeezes a hand-pump to inflate two air pockets that hug their chest and back, providing comfort in the application of gentle pressure. The hand-pump itself is soft and tactile, shaped to match the form of a person’s hand, and absorbs muscle tension to provide stress relief. The repeated squeezing of the pump combined with the soft compression develops a pattern that simulates deep breathing, guiding the user to practice breathing together with their garment. Essential oils are also dispersed with each pump as an additional calming element.

Furthermore, in creating Breathe with Me, I challenged myself to try to uphold environmental ethics when selecting materials, despite the lack of resources available for fast and affordable sustainable production. My final prototype is made with soft white cotton fabric by the way of vintage laundry bags, and silicone, which is non-toxic throughout its entire lifecycle when properly developed.

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Let Me Give Light

Yunho Choi

How can light and emerging technology create a more empathetic society?

Description

Let me give light is a series of augmented reality environments that repurposes ancient lighting technology in a modern context, inviting audiences to a meaningful and connected experience from their everyday life.

For the first part “Let me give light” is about giving light to our everyday light bulbs with meaningful interaction. The second part “Let us give light” invites users to an interactive light playground which aims the sense of enlightenment as well as deeper emotional connection.

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Thesis

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NYC Beats

Rushali Paratey

A web art experiment for New York’s iconic subway musicians and their underground audiences, nycbeats.xyz explores how to connect these artists in real time to engage their spectators via crowdsourced location information populated on a 3-dimensional map.

www.nycbeats.xyz

Description

New York City – has an amalgam of influences from all over the world which reflects in the city’s ever vibrant street music culture. A custom so strong that it extends into the transportation system – the century old subway of the city. Subway music is unpredictable, chaotic, rebellious and these tunes reverberating underground have an ecosystem that has flourished over the years. Protected by the 1st amendment yet outlawed based on decibel levels – whether it is a music student rehearsing or U2 in disguise, the subways have become a unifying stage for all. Observing this chaos led to NYC beats, an art experiment to gauge the patterns between commuters, musicians, music and locations. It is a WebGL map of NYC made with Mapbox and Three.js where one can navigate to find artists currently playing in the subways. Commuters can ‘spot’ musicians and musicians can ‘tag’ themselves on the map. MTA allocated locations are always “active” zones based on the Music under New York program's schedule.

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