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Box of Fear

Kexin Lin, Marco Wylie, Rachel Lim, Tianyi Xie, Zhe Wang

A box that educates fear is NOT where you think it is.

https://

Description

Our project is a box that utilizes Joseph E. Ledoux’s research to communicate that the subjective and objective states of fear are generated by two systems within our brain: one is responsible for physiological responses triggered by the amygdala, while the other elicits the “feeling” of fear and is related to areas of the brain that generate cognitive processes. This finding argues against the prior assumption that fear was generated by one system in the amygdala.

Our box will simultaneously educate about and elicit fear from users through display text on acrylic panels, a diagram of the brain formed by el wire, and tactical/sensory components within the box. When the user approaches it, they will be exposed to introductory text and audio about the research described above. They will then be encouraged to stick their hand inside a hole in the box, which will trap their hand and force them to interact with the internal mechanisms. The interior has three components on each side of the box: a rotating object akin to a drill, a vibrating motor, and a variety of soft/slimy materials. Each one will light up related content on the panels that delves into detail about each system in the “two systems” framework.

If the user wishes to leave or has completed perusing the contents they can press a button located on the top of the box to release their hand. Afterwards, they will receive a sticker and conclusive information about the research at the end of the experience.

Classes

Playful Communication of Serious Research

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The Melody Box

Chunhan Chen, Tianyi Xie, Helen Tang

A Music box that allows people to play with melody, rhythm, and pitch

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17hTV2WozzNrf6LkVpsHYtAEfgX9P2YCClhd9WNMam2o/edit?ts=5ccc623d#slide=id.g570cac924d_3_100

Description

The melody box is a technology-empowered music toy, inspired by the craft of traditional music box and the technology of midi instrument, it's designed to offer people a new experience to play/perform music without having any professional music training.

Users can play the music of their choice with any speed they want by simply cranking the handle, he/she will also be able to change the use of the instrument by inserting different cards into the box.

We all have a dream of composing/playing our own music. Even if we learn how to play an instrument when we were young, it is hard for us to make That’s why we would like to create a device that allows kids/adults to create and play the music on his own.

Classes

Hacking Smart Toys for AI Learning

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Eniac Girlz

Jacquelyn Liu

ENIAC Girlz: Program & Pretend is a speculative girl's play set to spark dialog about the historical inequities for women in computing, from the era of the first electronic computer through this day.

https://

Description

The origins of programming is a paradoxical story for women's empowerment. In the 1950s, the first ever programmers were the women who programmed the ENIAC, the first electronic computer. However, their roles (which primarily were to help calculate missile trajectories for the US military) were only given to them because programming seemed like routine, clerical, and feminine work. And despite being the first ones to problem solve around the newfound complexities of electronic computing, the contributions of these women have been largely written out of history.
“ENIAC Girlz: Program & Pretend” is a fictional toy for young girls that asks us to reflect on today’s efforts to bring women back into computing, that is, a field that systematically pushed them out from the 60s onward. By referencing early computing of the ENIAC era and borrowing the aesthetics of early-childhood domestic make-believe, this play set can inspire young girls to imagine themselves as future programmers – but with what fine print?
Many companies today help fund efforts to get young girls interested in computing, but which of these companies will ensure that girls will end up performing historical roles of inequity as they enter the professional workplace? Which institutions will write out their contributions, keep them in roles that are undervalued, feminized, and underpaid, and discourage them from questioning authority and speaking out against injustice?

Classes

Prototyping the Margins

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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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Paralang

Michael Blum

Through an educational learning hub and an interactive playground, both hosted on the same web app, Paralang aims to cultivate literacy, inspire curiosity, and arouse concern with respect to emerging neural language models.

Description

Recently released, state of the art language models have been shown to be able to produce text that is nearly indistinguishable from that produced by humans.

These recent advances, which have proved plenty controversial within machine learning circles, have caused ripples in the general media landscape as well, where coverage has been largely hyperbolic, excessive, and occasionally uninformed or even incorrect.

With the belief that this natural language generation technology, more than mere novelty, will gradually assume a more and more pervasive role in our everyday lives, I wanted to intervene, however modestly, and provide an accessible, beginner-friendly platform to help secularize this technology and elaborate on some of its inner-workings as well as its repercussions both for us as individuals and a society. I’d like to help answer questions like: what makes these recent advances so compelling and new? Or: how might existing societal problems by reproduced and reinforced by these advanced language models?

Ultimately, my aim is to help cultivate a more level-headed literacy as well as inspire both a sense of informed curiosity and concern with respect to these emerging models and their ramifications, with an emphasis on the recent and state of the art (particularly Google’s BERT and OpenAI’s GPT-2).

The platform consists of two components, both hosted on a single web app. One is educational, revolving around a learning hub, glossary, and resources curated for all skill levels — newcomer, intermediate, and advanced. The other is interactive, comprising of a “playground” encouraging hands-on experimentation with some of the language models featured in the educational component.

Altogether, the platform is built to accommodate non-linear engagements — users can begin with the learning hub and progress through to the playground, or simply jump to the playground, or maybe even just skip around between glossary and resources.

Classes

Thesis

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Let’s Read A Story

Itay Niv

My thesis project, Let’s Read A Story, is a speculative exploration on how computers and technology can turn story time into a conversation between parents, children and a computer. Human gestures — speaking, drawing, typing – allows the reader to participate in a new form of conversation on a smart device (tablet or a smart speaker) that yields a surprising new story.

www.letsreadastory.xyz

Description

Technology and smart devices are ever present in children’s everyday lives and their development. Let’s Read A Story investigates the possibilities of enhancing storytime for children with a Machine Learning-based program to engaging a child’s creativity, imagination, and inventiveness. The program is intended to be an activity joined by parents and child.

The project addresses the following questions:
1. can technology augment how parents read and tell stories to children?
2. Can a child interact with a piece of technology to create a meaningful connection through literature, sound and visual art?

Using recently possible machine learning techniques, various children’s literature corpuses have been analyzed in order to build a conversational platform that allows the reader to navigate through different narrative bits and pieces to weave a new, original immersive story of his own. The core of the experience is in the form of generated text that is a response or an answer to a human gesture (e.g speaking or drawing). The text is the first layer that carries the plot progression forward, on top of which, layers of generative sound and illustration are formed to enhance the text and based on various predictive models.

Lastly, the reader can change and bend the story as it progresses, drawing illustrations of their own and changing lines of text as their heart desires.

Classes

Thesis

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Who is RIGHT?

Zohreh Zadbood

I have designed an experiment that aims at helping individuals to better think about other people’s feeling and thoughts using interactive 360 videos. In fact, I want to help audience thinks about answering the question “Who is right?” during her exploration of my project. The user will acquire different perceptions about one specific situation which I designed in my story and she can find out how hard it is to put herself/himself in someone else’s shoes? and answering the main question.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/journal2019/kat/author/zz1971/

Description

The project is an interactive 360/VR art piece. My objective in this project is to design an experiment that aims at helping individuals to think more about other people’s feeling and thoughts. Not only does it help people experience other people’s thoughts, but also also it gets them to think about the reasons which make people’s perceptions different. The thesis takes a multidisciplinary approach to contribute to the research on human mind by combining concepts from psychology, communication, and interactive storytelling. From psychology, the top-down and bottom-up approaches are being used for getting the project message across. These two strategies of information processing and knowledge ordering, widely used in various scientific and humanistic research, are utilized in this project. My main question is ”Who is right?”. The user will acquire different perceptions about one specific situation which I designed in my story, which is about people’s romantic relationships. I shot some videos based on my story and the user will put on the headset and will see two scene in two versions. So she will watch part of four videos due to her interactions.

Classes

Thesis

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Blind Date

Xiran Yang

My thesis project “Blind Date” is an interactive story with game elements in the format of a phone-based website. It features a 28-year-old single Chinese woman’s struggles with enormous pressure to get married early. It is a reflection and critique of the conventions surrounding marriage in contemporary Chinese society.

https://xiranisabear.com/blind-date

Description

“Blind Date” is a storytelling project that talks about marriage in the format of a web-based interactive story. A user plays the role of a 28-year old Chinese single woman who is being pressured by her friends and family to get married.
There are three chapters in this game. The first chapter features the protagonist’s conversation with her best friend, Lorna, about the wedding of her younger friend, Cici. Along with the conversation, Lorna encourages the protagonist to date someone and warns her about the danger of becoming a leftover woman. In chapter two, the protagonist has a WeChat talk with her mother. Marriage is brought up in this conversation. And the resistance from the protagonist to get married angers her mother and leads to a fight between them. The protagonist compromises in the end and agrees to go on blind dates with several different men. That introduces the third chapter of the game.
In the first two chapters of the game, the user will be clicking through different buttons and graphics to follow the story. In the third chapter, the user will make some decisions before she goes on blind dates and the choices she makes will effectively change the ending of the whole story.
The user will be able to feel the increasing level of pressure the protagonist feels as the story goes on and hopefully he or she can take some insights away after experiencing this story.

Classes

Thesis

Thesis Presentation Video

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Refracting Rays

Aidan Nelson

This installation uses custom lenses and digital rendering software to allow audience members to engage with optics and the phenomenon of refraction.

https://www.aidanjnelson.com/

Description

How light interacts with surfaces, lenses and our eyes is fundamental to how visual arts are created and perceived. Despite this importance, education around basic optical principles tends to employ a science-first approach which may not resonate within an artistic community. This installation attempts to bridge that gap by encouraging audience members to holistically engage with optics and the phenomenon of refraction.

This installation consists of a series of engagements with playful and impractical lenses. A custom software tool distorts images such that they can only be seen through these lenses (a process known as anamorphosis). In the first such engagement, audience members are invited to draw on a digital canvas while looking through one such lens. They are then able to view the results of their work with and without the lens. In the second engagement, audience members encounter a large, amorphous video projection. They later realize that the imagery can be decoded through a viewer mounted within the space. These experiments aim to inspire audience members’ curiosity about the behavior of light.

As an artist’s understanding of foundational optical principles grows, their palette is expanded to allow aesthetic exploration and play using these elements. This installation aims to reduce technical barriers to entry and inspire artists to incorporate creative custom optics into their practice.

Classes

Thesis

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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