Category Archives: Nancy Hechinger

Dat(um)a

Hanbyul Jo

Dat(um)a is an art series that navigates the individual story within the scope of a big dataset.

Description

Data is getting bigger and bigger. An overview of the data gives a complete picture, but not the full story. 'Gentrification of New York City' is one example. My goal was to reveal the individual stories that make up the dataset–the datum within the data. First hand interviews about gentrification (the datum) were combined with income level change over 6 years (the data). The result is a series of sculptures that spotlights what is missing inside an averaged overview of data.

Emulative Emergence

Hannah Mishin

Emulative Emergence is an installation of networked kinetic sculptures comprised of three units imbued with individual emergent traits. The installation responds to viewers by emulating either fear, fatigue or attraction on an architectural scale.

Description

Emulative Emergence is based on the biological concept of Emergence and is inspired by flocking algorithms and cellular automata of pixels — of what can be done computationally on a screen. I have recreated those possibilities with modular physical units unified into an architectural kinetic installation. A responsive piece, Emulative Emergence exhibits pseudo intelligence via hard-coded behavioral traits based on users' proximity and velocity. The materiality and movements of the piece are biomimetic in form and function. Each unit is networked and communicates its status (fear, attraction, fatigue) to the others. This project is intended as the first section of a scaleable immersive art installation.

Life as We Know It

Asli Aydin

The piece is an exploration of the Quantified Self Movement and the representation of personal data. A journey into the self through quantitative and qualitative data, which is based on my experiences during my father’s battle with pancreatic cancer.

Description

Through a series of life-logging techniques, the project aims to ask questions such as: Why do we collect data? Does it tell us something we don’t know about ourselves? Does it change our behavior? I tracked myself as my father went through cancer. I wanted to discover whether or not my data could tell the story of my experience. Can I frame it to express emotion? The more I tried to put it together, the less I felt like it connected to my experience. I decided to create a book that compared the two states of my data during the process of death and how I felt.

The Interactive Lamp

Marlon Evans

The ability of having light anywhere in your room without having the footprint of a lamp.

Description

The lighting fixture is mounted in the center of the ceiling, protruding from the round diameter is a square telescopic tube with a light at the end. It moves anywhere in the room over head and is controlled by a user's commands. It will be used primarily in small apartments, offices or rooms where the need for space is an issue. The lamp turns 360 degrees and extends to the furthest part of the room. The lamp comes in bold colors that contrasts with the ceiling it is installed on, making it visible in a room. I foresee anyone that appreciates beautiful products using the lamp.

The Penis Wall

Peiqi Su

This kinetic sculpture consists of 81 erectable penises that respond to either a viewer's movements or to realtime movements in the stock market.

Description

The penis is so different! This is my initial motivation, to study one of the oldest and probably the most attractive thing that humans interact with.

The Penis Wall is made up of 3D printed penises that each have six segments driven by servo motors. Equipped with an ultrasonic distance sensor, each unit can respond to a viewer's movements. Moreover, the Penis Wall can also be used as a display to represent data, for instance, fluctuations in the stock market.

Growing The Internet of Everything

Andrew Sigler

I wanted to make a large assemblage of connected every day objects, but that was beyond my budget. So, first, I made my own homemade wireless microcontrollers.Then I designed an intuitive in-browser interface to connect my objects together.

Description

My thesis is a collection of found objects turned connected, each simple on their own, but reimagined through their links. Homemade wireless microcontrollers are built for each device, done at a fraction of the cost of ordering online . A touch interface allows users to patch links between separate objects, using any browser. Combining affordable production with easy links gives way for heightened experimentation while making the internet of everything.

There Is No Place Called Away

Ben Kauffman

Responding to the challenge of keeping all of my garbage for a month, I have designed a series of "personal landfills": objects and actions that bring the impacts of waste and landfilling into the context of the body and personal space.

Description

What would happen if, instead of allowing my garbage to be taken to a landfill, I kept it close? This question is the driving force of There Is No Place Called Away. The motivations of the project are to both learn about the workings of modern landfills and re-consider a facet of our society that is often ignored. Beyond an intellectual inquiry, it is meant to bring a subject often defined by distance nearer to my body. To carry this out, I have designed an installation of "personal landfills" to contend with one month of my garbage, both practically and philosophically. It features vacuum-sealed garbage pods, a mobile landfill, photographs and video, telling a poetic narrative of what it might really mean to throw our garbage "away."

The Path of the Pirate

Brett Peterson

In this exhibit children ages 2-4 embark on a quest to become a pirate. Along the way, they engage in activities that reinforce early childhood development milestones including pattern matching, sequencing, counting and motor control.

Description

This project was inspired by and created for my daughter. We love going to museums and play together. I wanted to create something fun for her but that also focused on her learning and development.

I designed and created three interactive experiences, each imagined as a portion of a larger exhibit, that are tied together by the theme of a pirate quest. Kids encounter these activities that challenge them to apply skills of pattern matching, sequencing and counting — all key skills in the cognitive development of children between the ages of 2 and 4 years. At the end of the quest is an opportunity for the children to create their own pirate flag and print out a temporary tattoo to celebrate their accomplishment.

Kinetisynth

David Rios

A multi-user musical interface and physical audio visualizer. Users interact with multiple controllers to create soundscapes and realtime physical visuals.

Description

Kinetisynth is part musical interface, part physical parametric display. Participants use various controllers and sensors to make music together and simultaneously control a real-time physical visualization of that music. It uses analog circuitry and MIDI to generate soundscapes while simultaneously analyzing and quantifying audio signals to create a real time mechanical frequency spectrum that reflects the soundscape.

Good Care Calls

Liz Khoo

Good Care Calls is a proposal for a service that provides caring phone calls to reduce costly hospital readmissions. Volunteer callers check on the wellbeing of recently discharged patients to promote healthy behaviors and ease emotional distress.

Description

Every year, 2.6 million Medicare recipients are readmitted to hospitals at a cost of $26 billion. Using human centered design methods, I learned about the needs of patients and care providers to design a solution for reducing readmissions.

The neediest patients are often the most underserved. An effective solution must be affordable and quickly distributable, which is why Good Care Calls only requires patients to have a phone.

Patients opt-in to Good Care Calls at discharge, and their data is shared via the hospital’s electronic health record API. Students preparing for degrees in health services gain valuable experience as volunteer callers and also act as a triage service to busy clinics, flagging issues in the patient's EHR.