Category: Projects

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Cover Covers

Personal music streaming system focused on listening to whole album with my own album cover.

Jung Soo Ha

https://youtu.be/C1QbDENlipg

Description

Cover Covers is a personal music streaming environment that appreciates the concept of album. It offers an experience of listening to albums with self-created album cover.

With the emergence of streaming services like Spotify, people gained easy access to music in a unit of songs. It brought music consumers a lot of convenience, but being able to curate a playlist with favorite songs, people stopped listening to albums as a whole. Listening to whole albums require time and sometimes endurance, but it provides us with a different experience that is certainly worthwhile. Even knowing this, I always find my playlist with songs from different albums.

I wanted to force myself to listen to albums. It's not that listening to individual songs is bad. I genuinely wanted to listen to albums, but my laziness and various excuses (eg. I'm too busy to sit down and listen to music for 30 minutes) stopped me from doing it.

So, I decided to design a process that would make listening to albums a fun activity. Human beings tend to value their own creations than those of others' regardless of its quality. The more beginner one is, the stronger this tendency. That's why my first pasta tasted better than restaurants'. If I were able to recreate an element of a music album, I would be eager to listen to it.

Not being able to draw and paint, I used a set of digital tools including machine learning and Photoshop to cover an album cover (as in covers in music). Then, I created a system where I can simply type a name of an album and have it played on my streaming website. It automatically swaps original album cover images with my own covers hosted on my blog.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.226.1
Artificial Intelligence Arts
Tool\\Service
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a 3d-printed toy: cheddar the III

a personalized 3d-printed toy designed for my friend in memory of a unique experience between us

Junyao Wu

https://wp.nyu.edu/june_blog/2020/04/08/project-2-personalized-toy/

Description

this toy is a decorative toy rather than a functional one. to play with it, you can put together the cheese and the burned toast together or detach them.

the model is built in cinema 4d. the toast is printed in hard resin material and the cheese is printed in rubber.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.238.1
Toy Design and Prototyping
Art
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Ruins of Node 8

A unique sound experience in a city after destruction

Chaoyi Wang

https://s3.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com/ima.nyu.edu/commlab/moon/chaoyi-wang/index.html

Description

*Notes: When viewing the webpage, click on “reset” a few times before you click on anything else*

First of all, this is a web-based soundscape.

This project was inspired by the rhythm game Cytus II, and the images came from this game as well. The story of the game happens in a future cyberpunk world where music is a common interest of all human. Node 8 is the name of a city in the game. My goal is to create a soundscape of someone (the user) visiting a house in the city ruins. The user can click on objects in the house to hear sounds and how the sounds interact with the environment. The overall experience should be poetic. However, by looking for an easter egg in the project, you might be able to understand the story behind.

All the sounds and background music are from Adobe sample pack or recorded by me. Another piece of music in the project is “Used to be” composed by KIVA. All of these sounds and music have been through postproduction. For the background music, I put together four ambient music pieces and several glitchy electronic sounds from Adobe sample pack. I also added filters on “Used to be” to make it sound a little distorted. As for the rest of the sounds, a little reverb would do the job.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.120.1
Communications Lab
Sound
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Minhwa in the Eyes of an AI

A recreation of traditional Korean folk painting in the eyes of an AI

Rick Kim

https://youtu.be/DNUUyyrqDYo

Description

The project is a recreation of a Minhwa painting called “The Tiger and the Crow” using a styleGAN2 model – a creation of a neural-net styled version of Minhwa painting.

Minhwa (민화) is a traditional Korean folk painting that has a unique feature that the painter is, most of the time, anonymous. Minhwa can be drawn by anyone. However, as many traditions get lost over time, the production of Minhwa paintings have been diminishing since the early industrialization era. Despite the current efforts to revive the tradition, it is slowly being lost as new generation steps away from folk paintings.

If everyone can be a Minhwa painter, I thought of a notion that an AI can also be an anonymous painter – an AI as an anonymous creator in order to pay respect to the long tradition of Minhwa creations. Through this project, I wanted to emphasize that anyone can be a Minhwa painter regardless of who you are. When even an AI can be a Minhwa painter, why can't you be one?

Although the product of this particular machine learning model seem odd and “imperfect” compared to the many Minhwas drawn by famous artists, the imperfection of the created painting portrays the essence of what folk paintings are – I am not striving to create a perfect folk painting, but a statement to the community that there is no “perfect” Minhwa.

The project involves using StyleGAN2, a machine learning model that creates similar styled images using a given training dataset images, as the main component. I was able to collect approximately 500 different Minhwa images with various styles, and trained on top of an existing pre-trained model to expedite the process.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.226.1
Artificial Intelligence Arts
Art,Machine Learning
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Lost for One Hour

A interactive documentary on the web page telling the story of this boy being dumped and what happened in one hour.

Tang Sheng

https://s3.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com/ima.nyu.edu/commlab/moon/kyrie-sheng/index.html

Description

This project tells a story about a boy who is dumped by his girlfriend, thus feeling lost and wondering in the city of Suzhou for one hour. The story is basically linear and chronological. Five video clips are included. One of them is an introduction, and the rest of them each tells the viewers what happened at a certain time point in that one hour. The main user interaction included in the project is hovering. The user will hover a clock for a certain length of time and jump to the next section when the clock turns black and white completely, representing the time flying away. The play is written by myself based on my own experience. I directed the video clips by myself and had my best friend Yiyang Shen act as the leading role. As for the style of the documentary, I intentionally constructed it with a low frame rate and low saturation, with a certain style of background music, in homage to Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai , in order to create a sentimental atmosphere and demonstrate the complicated emotions of the leading role.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.120.1
Communications Lab
Narrative/Storytelling
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Coil Gun

Improved Coil Gun & Visualization of Electromagnetic Response

Anpu Li

https://youtu.be/xb4wKKtDB-o

Description

We made two modifications on the coil aiming to make it more powerful. First, we bought a photoresistor, and plan to modify the circuit and add one more coil to have a two-stage acceleration. The second change is from a donut shape to a flat pie shape.

The coil gun can be really powerful — enough to send you into jail. However, we are tired of its encounter with hard objects. How would it behave if it meets a hard-yet-soft object: non-Newtonian fluid?

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.130.1
Working with electrons
Play/Games
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God Design

you tell me your daily life concern, a god that I designed will be given to you to address that problem. Believe it or not, keep it or not, it’s up to you.

Chenhe Zhang

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9U7Tred8X8

Description

Human beings create gods or gods create human beings, that is a romantic question. Growing up in a society where I could be exposed to both polytheism and monotheism, I was thinking, while new gadgets and tools were invented and upgraded to enhance people’s lives, gods haven't been updated for a rather long time. To explore the possibility of creating new gods who could specifically address problems and issues in human's daily life in a contemporary context, I use the term “god design” which means utilizing design thinking in creating new gods, everything in this project begins with this concept.

The basic layer of god design is to “design” new gods that work in a modern way, they use familiar objects that we usually see in our everyday life to impose their power just like the traditional gods use their weapons, however, the scenario they use the objects is not as usual. To showcase the gods and communicate with the audience, a booth-like interactive installation and a website are developed as “god search engine”, where the audience could input their daily life concern and being returned with a certain god that relates to their input in the form of a card. The installation took the concept of small size “pop-up” shrines that usually can be found in Japan and India, it will be finished in a hi-tech product aesthetic, and the website will be visually simple and playful.

This project is not aiming at creating a new religion, it is more about looking at everyday life from another angle, focusing on the small daily problems and concerns, delivered in a more absurd and playful way, but still, with its whimsical nature, I hope it could bring positive attitudes and a delightful experience to the audience.

IMA/ITP New York
ITPG-GT.2102.00003
Thesis
Art
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King Arthur and His Son Mordred

The IF Story of King Arthur and Mordred suppose the battle of Camlann never happened

Xiaojie Gu

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1fYb2Pg6uk7RMnm56lvuE85mT3LkfeOpd

Description

The two characters are from the Tale of King Arthur. The character in the front is King Arthur, while the character in the back is Mordred. In the original legend, Mordred was the son and nephew of Arthur and was born by Morgause, Arthur’s sister. Knowing that he was the bastard of the King, Mordred is always trying to crusade against Arthur. He managed to make himself King of Britain when Arthur was in France, and their armies fought each other at Camlann, which is known as the battle of Camlann. In the end, Mordred is dead, and he severely injured Arthur, which proclaimed the end of a dynasty.

In my automata, I create an if-story for Arthur and Mordred. If Mordred did not hate Arthur so much, one day they could sit down together, shake their hands, and defuse the hatred. So this is the scene that shows their charging posture in a battle, where they fight together against the enemy.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.238.1
Toy Design and Prototyping
Culture,Product Design
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The Carp Leaping Dragon Gate

This mechanism toy tells the story of the Carp Leaping Dragon Gate

Lishan Qin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z2OsdR1oMM&feature=youtu.be

Description

The name of this storytelling project is “The Carp Leaping Dragon Gate”. It’s a derivative of the ancient Chinese folk story. In Chinese culture, carp fish are always considered as a lower life. They’re vulgar, inferior, and are despised by other living creatures. However, legends say that in the east ocean far away, there is a giant gate called the “Dragon Gate”. The Gate is so high that it could reach the sky. It is said that the mighty god Emperor Yu once made a promise that if there is a carp fish that could jump over the Dragon Gate, he will turn the fish into a noble dragon. Thus, every year during the spring season, in front of the Dragon Gate there is the carp fish that keeps jumping up and down, up and down, in order to become strong enough to jump over the dragon gate and become the mighty dragon.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.238.1
Toy Design and Prototyping
Narrative/Storytelling
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The Public Chair

The Public Chair is a social critique on classist urban design towards the homeless population in public spaces through the implementation of hostile architecture.

Sofia Shockman

https://nyu.zoom.us/j/95950394007

Description

Used for seating and lounging, a park bench holds the purpose of recreation such as people watching, taking the dogs to the dog park and waiting, or to have a moment of rest. The Public Chair critiques how park benches in many metropolis cities have systematically suppressed homeless individuals through uninhibiting design. The Public Chair is a bench displaying hostile architecture as a critique of contemporary urban design by removing all practicalities from a typical bench.This abstract installation represents the convergence of similar yet fairly distinct class struggles, specifically for the homeless. I researched the design techniques that alleviate homelessness in Houston, Texas and have conducted interviews in New York City with several who identify as homeless on 7th and 9th street. They shared deeply moving yet traumatizing stories of their lives from the past, present, and the uncertainty of their futures. I asked them how they felt about public spaces and what they wanted to see out of them, but what struck me about their response is that they didn’t care what improvements could be done. What I discovered is that the issue isn’t a design solution, but a question of public policy and proper policing. They said that police are vigilant of their actions, thus a majority of the time they are asked to leave public property. I witnessed the policing firsthand as I was conducting my interview, the same officer circled us multiple times even though we were just chatting outside of CVS. The piece symbolizes the perpetual loop of political design and the implications of designing with inhibiting factors that hinder the use of the public sphere.

IMA/IMB Shanghai
INTM-SHU.401.1
Capstone Studio (Shanghai)
Social Good/Activism
NYU Tisch School of the Arts provides reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities. Requests for accommodations should be made at least two weeks before the date of the event when possible. You can request accommodations at tisch.nyu.edu/accommodation