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Kathy Wilson

Making Things Beautiful / Making Beautiful Things

Scott Garner

This interactive book is a philosophical, theoretical and practical exploration of the difficulties and delights associated with the human drive to create.

http://makingthingsbeautiful.net/

Description

This is an exercise in "writing to learn" as I attempt to codify a lifetime of lessons into a working philosophy for myself, for readers dealing with similar issues and for anyone else interested in the creative process. It would be impossible to write a comprehensive book on the subject, so I focus on aspects of creative work that I have found either particularly difficult or particularly rewarding. These ideas—such as perfectionism, inspiration and resonance—are supplemented by interactive illustrations, work by other creative people and quotes and concepts from artists, philosophers and authors.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Virtual Memory / Memory Memory

Sarah Rothberg

Virtual Memory/ Memory Memory is a series of artistic research projects examining the relationship between memory, media, attention, loops, attention, media, and memory.

Description

Media reflects the moment it was created. What is the effect on memory of shifting from analog, fixed in physical time and space, to digital? Does the relative mutability of digital archives leave us stuck in loops?

"Attn:Lifelog" passively indexes gopro footage with eeg attention data.

"URLoop" is a browser extension which alerts users when they navigate from website to website in a looped pattern mirroring deterministic thought processes of people with memory loss.

"Memory Place" is composed of personal memory artifacts, digital and digitized, arranged in a navigable virtual environment. The space created from my own memory-artifacts functions as a prototype: I will offer memory-virtualization services for a modest fee via the web.

Nancy Hechinger

PrintO-Bot

Sanniti Pimpley

PrintO-Bot is an inkjet printer on wheels. This robot can print on almost any flat surface- no matter how large or what material it is made of. It is very cheap and you can even build it yourself!

Description

There's a lot of interest in the hobbyist & maker community regarding printing your own designs on a variety of materials for aesthetic purposes. The PrintO-Bot allows us to do this very easily on any reasonably flat surface- wood/stone/ fabric/PCB/ any floor.

The PrintO-Bot is essentially an inkjet printer hacked into, modified and put on wheels. The printer here has its nozzle on the bottom; we put the bot on the material on which we want to print and it starts printing while moving along the material. The bot moves to the next position after each print swath. Since the PrintO-Bot uses an existing printer, we send a print to it the same way as we send a print to our desk printers.

The PrintO-Bot is an open source initiative.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Adventures of Teen Bloggers

Sam Brenner

Come face-to-face with the online identities of thousands of former teen bloggers. Choose a character from the annals of LiveJournal, an all-but-defunct blogging site, and lead them on the most epic of journeys: a walk down a high school hallway.

http://www.teenbloggers.net

Description

The Adventures of Teen Bloggers combines the aesthetic of old-school graphic adventure games with the vapid, self-obsessed musings of teenagers circa 2005. Players pick one of millions of LiveJournal users to re-animate and lead on a walk through a high school hallway. When asked to interact with another character, players discover the strengths (or weaknesses) of their character: they can only say things that the LiveJournal user actually said on their blog all those years ago. By dredging up a LiveJournal user's blog posts, once written under the semblance of privacy but now free of context and wholly public, I will draw attention to the permanence of our lives on the internet and question how we choose to share what we share online.

Heather Greer

Wrap Genius

Sam Slover

Wrap Genius is a personal journey into better food labeling. For 12 weeks, I carefully tracked all of my grocery purchases, recorded the data, and created a new visual framework to better make sense of it all. It's my dream food label.

Description

The food we buy matters. As our food systems become increasingly complex, the food we choose to consume affects not only our own health, but also the environment, our ethical framework, the Earth's biodiversity, and so much more. But much of the data of our food purchases remains opaque to us as end consumers. This isn’t good enough. So, I went on a mission to come up with something better. For 12 weeks, I carefully tracked all of my grocery purchases and created a new visual framework to better understand it all. Where does my food come from? What are my healthiest and unhealthiest choices? Which foods have GMOs? My dashboard shows me all of this information and more. It's my dream food label, designed for the interests of the consumer.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Cinder-Game

Ryan Bartley

The barrier of entry to programming low-level game design is too high. Cinder-Game seeks to destroy this barrier by allowing people to program high-level, low-level and extensible C++, while also learning proper game design techniques.

Description

Recently, video games have developed as a strong artistic and independent storytelling tool. However, the game engines available today are either too high-level to be realistically used, or too low-level for the creative coder. With my thesis, I bridged the gap by building out the high-level and low-level components of game engines on top of the creative framework, Cinder. The library includes a scene graph, physics, graphics, and multiple managers for cameras, 3d audio, saving state, rendering, scripting and effects that will make the process of creating a fast/stable game less tedious. The library will be open-sourced to support learning, to allow extending and to facilitate others looking for the same creative outlet.

Heather Greer

Moving Portraits

Rose Swan Meacham

Moving Portraits is a video series that documents the subtle facial gestures that express internal emotional states. Fusing art and scientific practices, nearly 100 portraits of the six universal emotions were recorded and analyzed quantitatively.

Description

Psychological research has classified six facial expressions that correspond to distinct universal emotions: disgust, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, and surprise. But do we truly understand how to interpret these internal states in other people? And is it possible for a computer to use predictive algorithms to determine emotions in humans? In an effort to explore these question, I generated a series of slow motion video portraits documenting the detailed gestures and physiological states of subjects responding to emotional stimuli. A classification tool and library of quantified emotions was used to analyze the subjects' movements and train neural networks to identify the motions indicating specific internal states.

Nancy Hechinger

Trajectory

Mack Howell

Trajectory is an experiment to find out what a smartphone sees when traumatic events happen to it — e.g. it's dropped, it overheats, it encounters g-forces. Its own sensors trigger streaming video, live imagery, that's then uploaded to a website.

Description

It is 2014 and smartphones contain a raft of sensors that gather data from their surrounding environs. I'm using these sensors to broadcast moments of shock or surprise from the device's perspective. Each sensor perceives one aspect of the environment and, as a group, they paint a precise digital picture of what the phone is experiencing. I see this as an experiment in automating video production from smartphones, while analyzing the medium itself by creating a specialized website for viewing incoming video streams. Each stream is a reaction to a jarring event, providing a temporally immersive snapshot.

Kathy Wilson

Discarded Future

Rafa Gross-Brown

I will create a series of connected web-based shorts to create a feeling of awareness about the local and intergenerational impact of climate change, with embedded information about local initiatives site visitors can pursue.

Description

My project will consist of a short about present local(city-specific) scenarios, created to be thought-provoking. I will develop a "pilot" video for my thesis, setting a programmatic & storytelling framework. The content will be tailored to a viewer's geolocation: visual and textual elements will set the story in the viewer's town, better contextualizing the narrative. A narrator reminds the viewer of how their town is subtly changing, and that change must happen.The theme "your town" will be supported by the theme"your kids". The subtext is climate change. The pilot will (ideally) be one of three shorts, each with a different theme: this one's theme is plastic. The experience ends with a list of geo-specific action-based initiatives.

Kathy Wilson

Wearable Radiation Detector

Peter Terezakis

There are 435 civil nuclear power reactors around the world and 71 being built. 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states in the USA.  Number of existing military nuclear reactors is not known.
I am constructing an open-source wearable radiation detector.

http://www.mykrodot.com

Description

In 2010 US criminalized media coverage of BP oil spill. Obama supports Japan's new secrecy law and has extended scope of existing domestic secrecy acts. Existing radiation detectors are often expensive and vary both in accuracy and credibility.



Accidents happen; events occur. 

There is a current and growing need to be able to detect the presence of abnormal levels of radiation in the food which we consume, the water we drink, and the volumes through which we travel and inhabit.

I will design and fabricate an accessible, affordable, and reliable device based upon sound physics and available materials. The open source device will have repeatable results using readily available parts.
Multiple detectors will increase sensitivity.