Category Archives: Class

Nancy Hechinger

Twinkle’s Vacation

Yang Jiang

Twinkle is a whimsical camera that has left his owner to start his very own vacation – a journey to discover himself in this big world. As he travels, he invites others to help him discover the duality of moments both transient and enduring.

Description

For me, photography is more than a hobby or a career. My camera travels with me always, helping to get at the essence of others at particular moments in time..not a cold machine or emotionless object. But I am so busy at ITP, I can't travel. My camera was restless. I thought: what if my camera could go on a journey alone and experience the world in its own unique way? I created Twinkle, a cute hand-made, programmable camera built with a Raspberry Pi. Twinkle travels the world, meets people, and invites them to help him document moments of life, both transient and enduring. Twinkle sends me photos of his journey and the moments he's encountered while I'm stuck at work. In this way, my camera becomes an extension of my vision once again.

Nancy Hechinger

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.

Nancy Hechinger

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.

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

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.

Kathy Wilson

Networked Dinner

Michael Milazzo

Networked Dinner is a TV Dinner re-invented for the twenty-first century. It provides an opportunity for users to produce a meal from start to finish, soil to table, with everything they need in one convenient, non-industrial box.

Description

Networked Dinner is a new kind of meal-in-a-box that can be used in the home of a user. When they open the box, which is branded with a satirical twist on the design of the original TV dinner, they'll find a "tray" that looks similar to a traditional TV dinner. In the place of a pre-cooked meal they'll find nursery pods holding a protein, starch and vegetable. The laser-cut tray will be assembled into a planter, to which they'll add soil, their seedlings and water. Over the course of the growing period, they'll monitor their meal's status with the help of a detailed guide that is customized to fit the crops that are included. When the crops are ready, users will harvest and prepare their meal, to be enjoyed in the company of loved ones.

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.

Katherine Dillon

Walking to the Moon

Ilwon Yoon

Walking to the Moon(WM) is a mobile RPG game that is a hybrid of game design and activities tracking apps/devices. The game turns walking experience into an adventurous PRG game, and users progress the story with their steps and fun game play.

Description

Self-tracking devices/apps are gaining a lot of popularity from mainstream, yet many of users find themselves failed to motivate to change behaviors and keep using devices/app for long term. What's the reason? I found this is not an issue of devices/apps itself, but the ways that they display data in plain numbers and graph. In order to solve this, WM brings a new approach to data as an element of game. In other words, WM tracks users' steps data and turns this data into required game resources to play the game. To progress the game, users need to collect their steps. Besides, the narrative of the game will offer an engaging game play to users, and this design will help users want to walk more for fun. Walk more, play better.

Katherine Dillon

Ecstatic Computation

Michael Allison

Ecstatic Computation is the union between human and machine (when thought becomes bit) explored through a mythopoetic lens that includes virtual reality rituals, mystical infographics and other computation related artifacts.

Description

As I become a cyborg though corporeal and mental appropriations of computational tools, what then of my metaphysical relationship to these new "bodily" members?

Through my research I've encountered many religious, spiritual and scientific practices that seek to make sense of the relationships between our minds, bodies, spirits and the universe. Some practices contain the notion of ecstasy, which in existential terms means to achieve a state of being outside of one's self. Using virtual reality, my project explores the moment of Ecstatic Computation: the merging of consciousness and quantum energy in the physio-chemical registration of state within the computer's memory. The moment when thought becomes bit and electrons become ideas.

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.