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Multi-modal Thumb Piano

Adekemi Sijuwade

A browser-based thumb piano that can be played with facial gesture, the mouse, as well as with a touchscreen device.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DdHtEXMxNGt4DkezKhGX1TMZvYaDIj80zovBGxOJTR4/edit?usp=sharing

Description

The thumb-piano app is a browser-based thumb piano that can be played with facial gesture, the mouse, as well as with a touchscreen device. It is targeted for users with weak hand muscles, but are able to use a smart device to engage in music.

Classes

Music Interaction Design

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Pulse Resonance

Jordan Rickman

An audio installation that allows you to feel another person's heartbeat not with your ears, but through your body.

https://

Description

Developed as an exploration of how sound moves through and interacts with the body, “Pulse Resonance” is an installation that allows you to feel another person's heartbeat not with your ears, but through your body. It involves two people: the “performer” and the “listener.” The listener lies down on their back on a low platform. A stethoscope and microphone pick up the performer's heartbeat – or other bodily sounds – and sends them to a surface transducer under the platform. In this way, the performer's heart is not heard through the listener's ears, but rather felt through their body.

Although I originally designed the piece as a performance with my own heartbeat, audience members also enjoyed taking on the role of performer, using the stethoscope on themselves and letting their friends feel their heartbeat. Thus, during the show I will take on the role of the performer at most times, but will also allow visitors to “perform” if they desire to. Thus, the project acts as both a performance and as an interactive installation.

Classes

Sound in Space

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A Hailu Mergia Fan & His Super-Modern Instrument

Billy Bennett

A wand to control music! There are no wrong notes…

https://billybennett.tv/music-interaction-design

Description

Inspired by the album “Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument” by Ethiopian artist Hailu Mergia, I built a musical wand that mimics these Mergia's distinct mode of playing. The wand controls musical pitches with aided by a visual component to increase understanding and engagement.

Classes

Music Interaction Design, The Nature of Code

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OCR 01-15-2179

Winnie Yoe

An interactive installation created to materialize a line/a boundary

https://www.winnieyoe.com/criticalobjects/01-15-2179

Description

An interactive installation created to materialize a line/a boundary. Excerpts from a letter detailing events that led to a Title IX filing investigation by the U.S. Department of Education is laser etched in decreasing font size. If the audience decides to cross the line to read the text, the light flickers and turn off, the time when they crossed the line is printed. The light turns back on when the audience step back. The audience’s crossing time is recorded on a SD card, which I collect at the end.

Classes

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Meditation Tunnel

Alizarin Waissberg

a hectic, invigorating, violently positive and painfully honest self-improvement VR rabbit-hole

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PPAktd6Jw9O1W8PHhHO0VGTCdC220e2igtCbZMkM13k/edit?usp=sharing

Description

“Relax.

Relax!

Breathe.

Sit still.

Are you still?

You are actually moving at great speed around the Earth, around the Sun, around the Milky Way, and through the universe.

Faster than riding a unicorn, on a skateboard, on a cheetah, in a bugatti, on a rocket!

Isn’t it amazing that you can breathe at all?!

So breathe!”

Step into the Meditation Tunnel: a mind-bending, hypnotic, exhilarating experience that pushes beyond the boundaries of VR.

The way to ride the Meditation Tunnel is via a VR headset, while seated on a unicorn in a magical transformative environment. While the main pinnacle of the Meditation Tunnel happens within the headset, it’s certainly not limited to it. Enhanced with projection art, custom-made headset and glitter-icious set design, Meditation Tunnel is as much a performance as much as it is a VR meditation. The viewer is guided to breathe, smile and speak, and their mere participation turns into a spectacle. Meditation tunnel suggests a digital, new-age, New-York, cerebral approach to guided meditation. The entire experience, from the first step into the environment is immersive, rich with audio-visual stimuli crafted to elevate, energize, enlighten, and shake the viewer to the core.

Watch the full, updated render of the tunnel here: https://youtu.be/wReM9uw5NSs

Classes

Open Source Cinema, The Poetics of Space

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Lurida

Kat Vlasova

A retrowave neogoth Virtual Reality experience that takes the user on a dystopian journey of becoming a successful artist in the social media age.

https://vimeo.com/333431088

Description

This project showcases an interactive VR experience created by a fictional company called Lurida which aims to teach users how to become “successful”. Users will come up to the company booth to watch a motivational video, speak to the representative (myself), sign a waiver and experience the VR Success Simulator. This dark humor project was built around the theme of emotional and creative exploitation of content creators, social media, fame, and inevitability.

Classes

Immersive Experiences (UG)

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Pleasure Principal

Arnab Chakravarty, Gabriella Garcia

A vibrator that rewards you for creativity, battery charged by making art.

https://pleasureprincipal.me

Description

This speculative proof of concept explores how behavioral intervention and self-tracking can stimulate creativity, literally. By tuning erotic reward toward art-making, we can recursively elevate both art and pleasure toward the virtue of bringing more imagination into the world, and honor the sexual response system for its purpose of creation. When a user interacts with the drawing app, their time spent doodling is sent to a database which translates to a number of minutes the device will power for.

Classes

Quantified Humanists: Designing Personal Data, Rest of You

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Sound Playground

Katya Rozanova

An ecosystem of semi-autonomous physical objects that emit sound when they want to but that you can also collaborate with by setting them into motion.

https://www.katyarozanova.com/art/soundplayground

Description

Sound Playground consists of a set of objects that emit sound upon being moved, touched, placed next to other objects, and activated by outside sounds. The system is semi-autonomous – the objects have a degree of agency. They can emit sound when they want to, sometimes triggering one another’s sonic behaviors. They can decide when they want to react to your tactile or sonic input and when to refuse cooperation by going into sleeping mode. They can decide which sonic behaviors to exhibit at a given time. Finally, they can decide when to record small snippets of environmental sound in order to insert them to an ongoing composition and when to play this composition back into the world.

Due to the ever-shifting behaviors of this free-willed, punky Sound Playground, your experience with it will never be the same. However, you may be able to notice patterns as you get to know the personality of each sound object and as you observe the socialites that these objects form with one another. While you, as the human, are gently decentralized, you can impress your sounds and interactions onto the playground’s memory, shaping some of its current and future behaviors. I call this collaboration.

The goal of this project is to create a meditative environment where you can focus on tactile sensations and create sounds with an opaque, autonomous ecosystem by observing and discovering its properties. It is also an opportunity to be with technology that demands respect and that respects your opacity in return. Neither party is expected to be fully knowable in order for collaboration to happen. This experiment aims to examine the effects of such encounters.

The experience is for those who might enjoy an anti-Alexa in their life. For those who might want to rethink their relationship with technology and other non-human ecosystems, question our privileges and limitations as humans.

Classes

Thesis

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Pre-mom Screening

Shu-Ju Lin, Wenjing Liu

A critical device that tells a user whether or not they should have a baby base on their DNA data.

https://jingdezign.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/smart-pregnancy-test/

Description

The control of birth is the most common bio-power throughout our human history, through which women’s body, especially womb, have been inserted into the machinery of country productivity. Even though feminism movement has improved the situation and liberated women with more freedom and human rights, the systemic control of birth and its oppression on women can still be found in many areas and countries.

In addition, the development of bio-technology, such as DNA sequencing, has empowered the system to monitor more human body data. As a result, more and more institutions and companies, like UK BioBank and 23andMe, have been collecting and storing individuals’ DNA data.

Classes

Critical Objects

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The two Flagpole protocols

Dana Elkis, Idith Barak

Two flagpoles with sheer flags dancing between the accepted flag protocols; half-staff, full staff.

https://pinkeey9.wixsite.com/danaelkisblog/blog/two-flags-protocol

Description

Two flag staff with sheer flags dancing between the accepted flag protocols; half-staff, full staff. By eliminating the flags identities and leaving only the bare mechanism we're allowing essentially 2 objects/2 flag staffs without anyone's agenda to create a conversation, possibly a machine like a dance that will underscore the complexity and Conflicting emotions of grief and victory. We are interested in examining the tension that this object retains.

possible to show on the front window of tisch.

Classes

Critical Objects