Tundi Szasz
Description
DLW provides digital tools for successful living. Includes workshops for self-reflection to enhance your potential + manifest the life you desire! Go to www.designlifewell.com to sign up.
Katie Han, Sue Roh
Description
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, anti-Asian racism has increased dramatically across the country. This trend has left many in the Asian American community deeply scarred during a time of confusion and vulnerability for all. In America, Asians exist in a purgatorial status, frequently excluded from conversations about racism. We felt strongly that these stories should not be silenced under the false model minority narrative.
Our project seeks to convey the magnitude of recent hate crimes by depicting stories reported to the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council. The simulation is populated with paper figures programmed with varying degrees of aggression walking along generated paths. When figures of different groups cross paths, the collision results in either a neutral or a negative encounter. One of the victim’s limbs falls and a story appears on the ground, which gradually fades away but leaves an imprint that permanently disrupts the landscape. The stories accumulate as the simulation runs until all of the figures are fully dismembered.
Yiting Liu
Description
This project creates a virtual experience that invites people to relive, rethink, and reflect their responses/ their change of behaviors towards the toilet paper mania during COVID-19. It is constructed as a museum experience with curated items such as footages, quotes, and sculptures about toilet paper. Viewers enter into a toilet paper roll and tour around the content as the water level rises up, which then eventually floods away all information before they can fully process it. This is to mimic how what we experienced forced us into a panic buying situation during the COVID-19. When there is a threat to our survival, panic and fear set in, impeding our rational decision-making. Through this interaction, I would love for people to reflect on the subtle changes in their mental states and behaviors during COVID-19.
Topher Blair
Description
What do you do when the world falls apart? Extinction Party is an educational puzzle game that explores the history of life on Earth by looking at the five major mass extinction events. It will take the form of a 3-foot high standing pentagon shape, with each side of the pentagon containing fun ways for participants to explore what life looked like before and after the extinction, and how why scientists think it happened in a certain way.
My thesis project is one side of this theoretical sculpture, which will be playable as a computer game. The game will be a proof of concept for a larger physical sculpture, which would be installed in a museum. I hope that both kids and adults will enjoy playing with it.
Alizarin Waissberg
Description
Originally envisioned as an onsite video sculpture concept
for galleries, festivals and nightlife venues, reimagined as a virtual visionary video chat interface, encouraging human connection.
Jingyi Wen
Description
While modern technology is making remote communication easier, senior people like my grandma still don't have many choices. Even learning how to use a smartphone is challenging enough for her and she still prefers to use a flip phone and she’s only doing phone calls with it. But phone calls are far from enough for our communication.
My thesis project aims to explore a more accessible way to strengthen the bonding and create better companionship for elder people like my grandma. The end goal is to create an easy-to-use product that can show my daily life visually and auditorily to my grandma.
Louise Lessel
Description
In the past few centuries humankind has been systematically removing itself from nature. Today we live in a society where “nature”, is understood as “plants”, “city parks”, or “landscapes”, all of which are sculpted by human hands and must attempt to exist on human terms, at timescales that are ever faster. This installation inverses that relationship, and asks what it would feel like if humans existed in the slow realm, on plant terms. The installation consists of a series of robotic branches protruding from a wall. They react slowly to human presence in the room, and demand people to adjust their movement to exist on their terms, which mimic real natural responses of plants. A failure to slow down will harm the branches and only as the humans leave, will they slowly heal again. Though if a meaningful co-presence is achieved, the branches will thrive and cast the room in a beautiful lumia light.
Presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIymhbuFpOI
Mingna Li
Description
I have a background in stage lighting design. In most stage performances, designers hide the light instrument above the stage or on the side behind curtains where audience could not see the light source itself. When I designed lighting for dance, I always thought I am also creating choreography but with medium of light. With this experience, I started to wonder what if I put light on stage, so that they are no longer complimentary roles in performance, but instead an actor, an expressive performing instrument on stage.
You Are Not the Only Particle in Universe is a continued research from a past performance project, In a Box, which I first created a performance that included a custom made instrument with home lamps and home lamp switches. My thesis project further develops this instrument with more interactive functions and allows the performer to create more versatile music and movement.
Light 2.0 is a multimedia performance that combines light, music, and movement, when light and music are not complementary roles and movement and performers are also not leading roles. Together, all these elements become performing instruments on stage.
The performer can bow, tap, or spin the lamps to create various combinations of music, light, and movement. When bowing the lamp with a bow or tap near the sensors, it looks like bowing a cello and plucking. The performer can also spin the lamp shade to activate different parts of music composition.