I propose a synaesthetic cinema which can make an audience experience his/her new and very own consciousness by creating my own language in which visual, sound and motion are inseparably blended together.

FIT*ly is an application that can help you improve your lifestyle and achieve your goals. Using the accessibility of mobile devices, FIT*ly expands the practical range of trackable activities and creates new incentives for pursuing desired behaviors. A simple interface on a device that is always at hand turns regular data-logging into a competition against your social network. FIT*ly lets you monitor your habits and compare your routine to that of your friends, rewarding behaviors like getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, and eating fruits and vegetables. By creating new incentives for awareness of moment-to-moment decisions, FIT*ly turns self-monitoring from a tedious chore into a habit-forming game.

The way people watch Television (an amorphous term in itself) is changing, and the technology capable of delivering a satisfactory viewing experience is changing as well. Despite these changes, very little of the screen experience has changed – it’ still very much a broadcast, lean back model. I propose to create a time stamped comment and tagging application for time shifted viewing audience that uses an internet connected television and wifi enabled mobile device, enabling audiences to make and view comments with asynchronous video content.

A major challenge faced by people with visual impairments is “way-finding” – the ability of a person to find his or her way to a given destination or through a space. My thesis proposes a new assistive technology system for the visually impaired to aid in way-finding. This system is based on a camera cell phone, which is held by the user to find and read aloud spatially located physical markers in the environment.

Blinded is a network of interactive kinetic sculptures. The unique physical appearances, behavior patterns and interactions between each other combine together to create the illusion of a small ecosystem formed by supplementing while counteracting alien organisms that are never seen on the earth before.

The installation consists of a projection of a silhouette that appears on a staircase. As the viewer proceeds along the stairs, a projection of a silhouette, emerges from the opposite end. If the viewer begins to walk down the stairs, the projected image starts at the bottom and moves toward them and proceeds past them as they continue walking. If a person starts at the bottom, the projection emerges from the top. Ultimately, the viewer and the shadow pass each other along the way.

For the purposes of staging, I will be building a small mock staircase to prototype and test on. I will need to mount a projector and camera from above.

Over 30 years ago the arrival of inexpensive portable film cameras prompted Red Burns to found the Alternative Media Center. In those days it was a revolutionary idea to put technology in the hands of the many and allow people to tell their own stories as opposed to passively consuming media.

Fast forward to the 21st century where cameras are ubiquitous in devices that people carry around with them all the time. The access to technology for story telling is literally in our pockets!

The problem however is that most people only use these devices as phones or worse texting & email checking machines. Text is Archaic, having been around for thousands of years, yet we still use our super advanced technology to push around these little dark scribbles on white backgrounds. Sound and Image is infinitely more interesting. Lets take full advantage of the fact that our ability to produce it sits firmly in our back pockets.

Now that we see we have immediate access and the power to produce compelling media with devices that we all have access to the question becomes, “How do we Motivate others to make this revelation and start producing content?” To Answer that question let us turn to a little bit of sociology.

Sociologists loosely define a tribe as group of people who share a common ancestry and culture. This definition historically was used to focus narrowly on describing ‘tribal’ people and conjures up notions of tribal paint and fire dances with ritualistic behavior (thank you Apocalypse Now for burning those scenes into our brains).

A more modern definition of tribe expands on the distinction of ancestry and culture to focus on a group of people who share a common cultural identity. This identity is performed by a set of shared practices and rules (sociologists call them mores).

A tribe under this definition can be as simple as your church group or your baseball team or even your poker buddies.
We all belong to many different tribes that carry different rules of membership and practices. In order to ‘prove’ our membership within a particular group it is necessary to display our membership in one fashion or another.

Consider a ‘tribe’ of friends that enjoys baseball. Members of this group might communicate their membership of baseball fandom by wearing ball caps and jerseys while watching games together at their local sports bar. The practice of cheering for a team and talking about the sport within the language of the game helps constitute membership within the group.
In this instance we also see that articles of clothing have the power to communicate membership of the group. At first glance one can easily pick out the Red Sox fans and the Yankees fans within the bar. The lesson here is a very important one:

Objects communicate value.

The car you drive, the shoes you wear, and even the cereal you buy, on some level communicates something about who you are. It also says a lot about the company you keep as in the social groups you align your identity with.

If you drive a hybrid vehicle the odds are that you probably identify yourself within a environmentally conscious tribe. You might also see yourself in direct opposition to someone who chooses to drive a large gas guzzling suv. There are many things we might infer from your vehicle choice. The important thing to note is the power objects have in communicating value between groups. Objects become the ‘BADGE’ by which we signify our identities.

A ‘BADGE’ in this line of thinking is a place holder, a sign that communicates value within and between tribes of people.

The mobile social platform ‘BADGER’ takes this idea of badges of identity and tribal groups and turns it into social game. Groups or ‘Tribes’ are organized by ‘Crews’ that encompass similar interests between individuals. An individual seeks membership (and maintains membership) within a particular Crew by completing challenges and winning badges. Badges are attained by submitting evidence of a completed task in the form of a picture or video that the community at large votes on and deems worthy of a particular badge.

BADGER distinguishes itself from other social mobile platforms by maintaining its not just about PLACE its about PEOPLE. Or more specifically how people communicate value and their relationships to each other.

Hapless Fame is a fictional narrative that tells the story of \”Lisa\”, a young writer on a quest to find fame while unintentionally getting herself into a ton of trouble. Hapless Fame allows the user to dictate both the order and perspective of events by exploring a series of multimedia content including maps, text, images and video. The user navigates the story as a voyeur, gradually unveiling the intentions of each character by viewing unique stories, gradually revealing a bigger story.

My thesis project is a manifesto-less, interactive installation project that is an exploration of a hybrid experience of two realms: the virtual world of literature and poetry and the tangible world of physical objects. I want to create a connection between the processes of creating sentences to the process of accumulating a physical reality- to concretize the relationship between building stories with words in our heads with building a reality that we live with in the world everyday.