Being raised as a Baha’i half-Iranian woman in an Evangelical Texan suburb created a sense of disassociation from and confusion about my cultural heritage and identity. “You’re not brown, just tan,” investigates these perceptions of cultural heritage through exploring childhood memories, family legacy, and media imagery. The project proposes new forms of hybridity via Iranian memory objects and videos created out of the material of the Texan suburbs where I grew up. These components will manifest in a comprehensive multimedia installation, recreating an imagined Iranian/suburban home space. The sculptures in the space are suburban/Iranian mash-up memory objects: a Persian rug made of suburban couch upholstery, roses made of Christmas wrapping paper, a backgammon board made from my childhood Monopoly board, and calligraphy designed using kid’s Crayola markers. I also have created a series of videos to screen in the space on a television set I am constructing. These videos are designed in different television styles (cooking show, horror movie trailer, music video) for consumption in the medium I consumed while shaping my identity.

How do artists depict and map urban environments? Throughout history artists have used the most recent technologies available to create images of what surrounds them. I have always been interested in how the city can be represented, first through photographic images, later through websites and now through using code. Movement Through Urban Space is a multi-faceted project (prints/animations/installation) that uses Processing to create representations of urban space and to draw the figures who populate the city to the screen. The project is also a data visualization depicting the number of unemployed as animated figures moving in an abstract representation of urban space. Viewers can look at varying countries contrasting the changing numbers of jobless people in the world.

Irregular Incurve has a similar construction structure as acoustic guitar. Instead of mounting strings on the neck, each string is mounted on an independent steel pipe. The steel pipes are fixed onto a curved shower rod by 3 pieces acrylic panels. Twelve controllable arms are mounted on the shower rod as well, which can pluck the strings by moving guitar picks. A homemade bridge transfers the vibration of the string to a spruce-wood sound box that sits under all the steel pipes. There are no nuts for different frets on each string. It only produces 12 simple tones. With the ability to change different strings and tuning manually, it can be used to perform different music.

Modern lifestyles force many parents to spend considerable time away from one another, and their babies. In some cases, parents are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles due to their careers and other factors. This can place a strain on their relationship as husband and wife, and throw their roles as caregivers into disarray. The Honeycomb is a suite of devices that enable physically separated spouses to connect with one another by providing sensory experiences of archetypal parenting activities from various stages of babyhood.

I am both a performer of improvised music as well as a composer of algorithmic music. Often the goals of these two activities seem at odds with each other. “Outis” is a piece that is intended to bridge these two rather disparate methodologies by providing algorithmic constraints to otherwise free-form improvisation. In “Outis,” the interpretation of the score is divided into layers. At the base, there is the source material, consisting of an individual or set of video loops or a live camera feed, which is “read” by a computer-vision program. The program attempts to “make sense” of the image by extracting features from it through a blob-detection routine (explained below). The blob-detection routine makes certain information about the image available to the program, which then uses a rule-set to decide which features on which to focus its attention and attempts to create a generalization of that data in a form that is musical and auralize that form. The point at which the derived data is auralized is where the performer(s) can lay their hand on the process and, within the constraints of the system, improvise. Because the program has agency in the interpretation of the score, the program can itself be seen as a performer. The author goes one step further in his conception of the performance situation, seeing the performance as an act of one agent in which the human and machine elements are participating for the duration of the performance act, which is at once algorithmic and improvised, or algo-improvisized.

As tools, the projector and the computer screen have long dominated the world of interactive art. While these devices certainly have their uses, the pieces created with them are often fleeting; The richest of projected, virtual environments and screen based compositions all disappear a flick of a power switch, leaving no physical record of their impact on the audience, or the audience’s impact on the piece.

By combining one of the oldest, traditional art forms (drawing) with one of the newest and most innovative, (physical computing), I aim to create interactive installations with a slightly more permanent outcome. Over the past few months, I have built several autonomous “cobots”, or robots developed for direct interaction and collaboration with their operators/audience, that create unique and distinct works of art in a clear and direct partnership with their audience. Both prototypes and their users work in a symbiotic process, each readily contributing to the outcome of the drawings being created, in real time, before them. The finished physical compositions themselves will serve as a permanent record of the interactions that have taken place between the robots and their onlookers.

The first of the cobots, named ShadowBot, operates in a dim setting, and, by employing an array of light sensors, responds to the shadows of its viewers. The second machine, SoundBot, utilizes an amplified and filtered microphone output to react to noises created by its audience. Both of these cobots were built upon the ArdBot platform, an arduino based, modular robotics platform, developed from the ground up for the purposes of this project, as well as for future experimentation.

yourlinguafranca.com is a user-generated foreign language learning site. This is a series of short narrative videos and scripts created by users to sample their native language. Bilingual users can translate the scripts into a new language. The key words (nouns, verbs, etc) can be tagged and will be inputted into a searchable database.

Eventually a cross-referenced database of videos/scripts will exist in every possible language, so users can learn any language by way of another.

You step out of the house for some exercise, a jog, walk or maybe something more extreme. Music is an important part of this. You put on your favorite sports music playlist in your device of choice. The music starts and keeps going perfectly fine, and you realize that you’d like to hear another song so you move it to the next. Not that big a problem, until you decide to do this action say 10 times in 20 minutes. And your favorite song still doesnt come on, as you reach for the door back into your house, it finally does and then you have to stop the device and go on with your day.

Music storage is currently done very well by different brands and devices. The controls still have room for improvement. The so called “universal design” principles help make it easy for most people in most situations. I’d like to address one particular situation and type of people: those who prefer to not have to change the music manually in the middle of their exercise or relaxing activity. I’m proposing a new interface to control the music player that attempts to make the music be more in sync with the body and react to what happens to it, when the situation allows for this.

I also see an application for this in relaxation techniques, yoga and anti-stress treatments, where the music player is able to detect a change in the body and through music, help bring it back to equilibrium.

Follow yourself or them. Build a stage for people to show their habit, work, profession, and personality. When they meet other person, they will fellow the other person’s habit or change. The purpose of the game is to show how people meet each other and, as a result of their interaction and continued association, effect change or somehow alter the traits of the other person.