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Winding time

Chengchao Zhu

Winding Time is an experimental installation that conveys the idea of how people’s relative speed affects their personal timeline and how people’s movement influence their time spread in a particular space.

https://chengchaozz.com/#/winding-time/

Description

People think time as a measurement, because of its absoluteness. Consequently, we let time decides our life; we encounter endless deadlines; we are busy fighting with time. I can’t stop thinking about why people have so many struggles with the notion that human created. While, about time, Einstein’s theory of relativity has given us a new perspective to consider time as a changing element around us, it’s not only dynamic but also personal. People have their personal timelines because of their relative speed to others and different interactions within the space.

Winding Time is an experimental interactive installation trying to visualize how people with different speed have different timelines and how their timelines demonstrate their movements spread in a particular space. What the installation showed could consider as a short recent personal timeline trace which was affected by their movement and speed.

Winding Time invites people to wind up a clockwork motor, and while it is releasing, the stretched personal timeline will be generated gradually according to the recent past with timestamps. People will be able to observe their past timeline and also could compare theirs to others’.

Classes

Thesis

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Future Dining

Kexin Lin

Future Dining is an AR project represents the future dining after all foods went extinct.

https://ellielin.com/future-dining/

Description

The concept behind the project is to reveal a pathetic truth that human beings are ruining the environment, but people are also too good at adaptation to realize that what they’ve done was sometimes irretrievable. The project will represent a very delightful but common future dining scene as an ironic way to exaggerate the unconsciousness of human being regarding environmental issues.

Classes

Video Sculpture

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Fu Ping

Haiyi Huang, Woan-Chin LIN

A video installation that portrays the absence of the sense of belonging.

https://vimeo.com/334330143

Description

This installation is a digital portrayal of the artists and their continuous search for their sense of belonging. Both artists left their home country at a very young age, and the experience of constantly moving to a new city has led them to accustom to the feeling of not deeply rooted in any particular place. In this installation, the artists and the cities they have lived in are projected on the two leaves floating on the surface of the moving water. It uses the metaphor of “fu ping” (the mandarin for duckweeds), which are plants floating on the surface of still or slow-moving bodies of fresh water, as a symbol for the artists’ rootless feelings.

The concept of the installation originated from the artists’ personal experience. Having to acclimate to different environments and cultures in their early stage of life, the artists have constantly taken on new identities and are constantly looking for a place where they feel they belong. The hustling bustling videos of the cities in which the artists have lived are projected in the shape of their bodies, contrasting their projected lackadaisical movements on the leaves, to emphasize on their helplessness of the swift shifting of their environment. The floating leaves on the moving water are a symbol for “fu ping” (the mandarin for duckweeds), which the artists use as a metaphor for their sense of rootlessness.

Classes

Video Sculpture

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Stonewall50: A Historical Look at the Washington Square Park Arch

Ryan Grippi

The Washington Square Park Arch was originally built to commemorate this country's founding fathers on the Centennial Anniversary of Washington's Inauguration. What better way to commemorate the founding mothers and fathers of the LGBT Civil Rights movement than to redecorate the arch for their own half-centennial anniversary.

https://

Description

This Projection Mapping on a scale size brings to life the past 50 years of queer history that has happened around the Washington Square Park Arch.

It is a symbol that has been there through it all: from the early marches to STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), the rise of ACT UP, the birth of voguing, the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York, the loss of Pulse nightclub, the current discrimination against transgender men and women, and now the 50th Anniversary of that iconic summer night when queer people of all kinds fought back against a society that would not accept them.

Classes

100 Days of Making, Video Sculpture

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Breath We Live

Ella Chung

Breathe We Live is an interactive meditation experience that awakens the reflection of the human relationship with nature through breathing.

http://www.ellachung.com/breathwelive

Description

Breathe We Live is an interactive installation that presents the invisible connection between human and natural environment through shedding lights on the activity of breathing. The invisible exchange of oxygen is brought into the projection of the natural world and human connection. The breathing sensors track the user in real time of their breathing frequency, and the interaction with the plants will help the user to meditate and slow down their breathing. The goal of this installation is to encourage us to rethink our connection and responsibility towards nature. The installation invites people to pay close attention to their body through a session of breathing meditation practice. I created a meditative space, with embedded interactive components, that enables intimate experience between viewers and the natural environment. Only one or two people can enter the space at a time. The installation uses human breath as an input to produce corresponding visuals in real-time. A Kinect camera mounted inside the space will detect the user’s movement to provide a false feedback loop for breathing, when the user is moving and breathing too fast, the visual and music will slow down to give the user feedback to breathe slower. According to my research about mediation, walking through nature is one of the best ways to relieve stress. I wanted to create a meditative space for people to understand their breathing activity and their close relationship to nature. I hope the experience helps the users to reflect their relationship with the current state of nature.

Classes

Thesis

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Life in a Nutshell

yiyao nie

This project has two parts. The first part is a series of sculptures. The second part invites visitors to become part of the chinese characters to experience 12 stages of life.

https://www.yiyaonie.space/lifeinanutshell

Description

Chinese characters (language system) evolved in sync with Chinese people’s character and culture. This installation invites viewers to interact and understand the root of the written characters and an introduction to Chinese philosophy which is the foundation of the Chinese character. Also, there are 13 sculptures coming with this installation.

Classes

Video Sculpture

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Hear The Line

Chenyu Sun, Chenhe Zhang, Qice Sun

Hear The Line – Augmented Reality Collective Story-Telling Experience​​​​​​​

https://www.chenyusun.com/hear-the-line

Description

It sounds like audio social media posts placed in a mirror world (augmented reality), it is also a new way of storytelling. It could be considered as a site specific experience, only in certain place and by certain moves could you perceive the few minutes experience created by the previous users, people can feel how the “sound” creator was going through in that minute at that specific place by moving the way he/she moved.

Classes

Mobile Lab, Mobile Lab, Video Sculpture

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Future’s Market

Alden Jones

Future’s Market is a store of tomorrow: a predicted intervention into predictive systems, a performance of ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure, or a look at a world where walls and wires and bank accounts heave and palpitate with a million unhidden eyes.

http://future.click

Description

Future’s Market is the performance of a real store. Practically it operates as a kiosk facilitated by Jim Future, it’s main proprietor, played by Alden. They sell a variety of different speculative services meant to be interventions into the predictive economy of tomorrow, which, thanks to ubiquitous IoT sensing technologies, has become a near perfect loop between surveillance, prediction, and behavior modification. Customers are able to buy new personalities, edit their biometric profiles, bottle up emotions to save for later, have their trash examined and scored, or get their identity scrambled. Each of these services is played not so much as a subversion of this new economy but as an unexpected extension of it, a disruption that plays by the same rules, a way of gaming the system by taking it at face value. If someone’s Google search history can be used to infer their personality, why couldn’t their personality be changed by targeted searching?

Jim is played as the type of man who’s never been told “no” by life yet whose greatest ambition as a small business owner is to one day pack up shop and go on a never-ending Carnival Cruise. A little bit outlandish and stylish but only so far as to drum up new business, inside he’s just an everyman trying to make by without his own mediocrity getting in the way. He isn’t really cut out for this world but then, who is?

Classes

Thesis

Thesis Presentation Video

https://vimeo.com/331733303

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The Self-Driving Human

Dan Oved

The self-driving human is a device and performance where an intelligent portable agent makes decisions for a person in the real world.

https://www.danioved.com/self-driving-human

Description

As technology increasingly becomes integrated with our daily lives, we rely on it more and more to make decisions for us, from things such as how we should get from one place to the next (Waze), to what we should have for dinner (yelp, tripadvisor), to what content we should see on the internet (social media), to who we should date (dating apps). What would a future feel like when all of our decisions are made by these machines?

The self-driving human simulates this scenario by making choices for the human in areas that are currently not decided by technology. It’s a portable device that detects objects around the person using a camera and machine learning, and gives commands to the user on how to interact with the environment based on an arbitrary algorithm that changes day by day. It allows the person to outsource thinking and decision making to an algorithm that they do not entirely understand.

The agent’s decision space is limited to what the machine has been trained to see. The user does not know what the logic of the algorithms are, and while the machine does know the objective, it does not know if it is good or bad. What happens when the objectives of this machine differ from the objectives of the person its meant to serve? How do the choices made by the algorithm collide with the humans desires when they’re disconnected from the biases and emotions of that the person has learned throughout his or her life?

The device is portable and works totally offline using machine learning on the edge, allowing for real-time response even where there is no internet connection, and maintaining privacy as all data stays on the device.

For the performance it is carried by me in the real world, where I listen to its commands and attempt to do as we’re instructed, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me.

Classes

Thesis

Thesis Presentation Video

https://vimeo.com/331468540/settings