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Bots, Cells and Humans Watching

Sebastian Morales

Bots, Cells and Humans Watching is a speculative ecosystem where inorganic life forms and single-cell organisms come together in symbiosis. Humans are invited along, but only as observers

https://symbiosis.live

Description

The piece can be accessed though the estuary website symbiosis.live. Here, the digital Internet meets the physical world, connecting servers to a bioreactor containing living cells. This creates an environment that is subject to both physical and digital influences, transforming it into a peculiar habitat capable of supporting new forms of symbiotic relationships.

As inorganic living organism (crawlers, fetchers, scraper, spammers, hacking tools, etc.), bots for short, visit the server, their presence is recorded and their behavior studied. What were they looking for? What were they trying to do? The information is then used to turn the server into a more alluring honeypot, designed to attract them, and if possible, keep them coming back.

As bots move through the estuary, going through links and filling out forms, their movement releases food into the paramecia bioreactor. Paramecia are single-cell eukaryotic organisms belonging to the kingdom of Protista. They are neither plants, nor animal, nor fungi. They flourish on bodies of water and were in fact among the first microorganisms seen though a microscope back in 1665 by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. The paramecia living inside the estuary website were collected from distinct areas of New York City, including puddles, fish tanks and Central Park.

Last come the Humans Watching. The website is designed to distinguish between Bots and Humans, in fact it looks very different to each. When a bot visits the website, a new page is generated to fulfill the bot’s request. When humans visit, they are presented with a live video stream of the paramecium through a microscope, they can telepresently control the microscope and explore different parts of the microscopic environment. Humans can also see a live log of recent bots in the server, observe their behavior and intentions. Humans do not have direct access to influence the system.

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Perfect Housewife

Yihan Chen

A toolkit of mechanical machines designed for a fictional feminine role, Perfect Housewife is an installation that examines entrenched ideas about woman’s household labor. It offers resistance through humor and self-examination.

https://

Description

If I were a housewife, what would I need in order to fill that role flawlessly? Perfect Housewife is a toolkit customized for a fictional role I assigned onto myself. It is designed as a series of machines for this imaginary character, accompanied by a manual(performance) that explains their ‘perfect usage.’

These kinetic installations include a chopping knife that helps me avoid the strong smell of onions, a lulling hand machine that assists to calm a baby to sleep and allows me to continue to play on my phone, an iron steak cooker, and a machine that encourages me and my other machines to finish my work.

Objectively, these machines are useless, because of the nature that this perfect role does not exist. In the performance, I try to make everything perfect as a housewife and pretend that everything is under control. In this context, the role of ‘housewife’ is an over exaggerated symbol. Through the clumsy, repetitive, strange, and even violent mechanical movements of these imperfect machines, I aim to express resistance to prevalent attitudes relating to woman’s household labor. I consider this performance as an experiment of challenging the perceptions of women as housewives.

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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.

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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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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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