Category Archives: Class

Heather Greer

CARDIO

Kang-Ting Peng

Quantify your heartbeat. Display it on the road.

Description

"CARDIO" is a pulse detector on the steering wheel in your car to measure the driver's heartbeat. After receiving and quantifying the driver's heartbeat information, "CARDIO" sends the information to the LED strips mounted outside the car. By syncing the person and the machine, "CARDIO" makes the car a way to communicate on the road. "CARDIO" is a tool for quantifying the driver's emotions and assists other drivers in detecting situations such as road rage. In this way, "CARDIO" attempts to connect drivers and road users in a more personal visual way.

Kathy Wilson

Hack It Back

Patricia R. Zablah

A workshop mentoring program focused on teaching media literacy to teenage girls. The girls combat sexist media by creating their own, new media that "hacks it back" and portrays more accurate representations of women.

http://www.hackitback.com

Description

Hack It Back is a program that teaches women and girls to decode sexist media messages through observation and critical analysis of media, its creators and its effects. In the workshops, which range from eight hours to a month, teens are paired with mentors to create their own media. They use digital and analog tools to break stereotypical gender roles. At the end of each workshop, teens strengthen their confidence by presenting their projects to an invited audience. The projects are published online and made available for download, if applicable. Ultimately, Hack It Back fosters a better image of women, becoming a catalyst for participants to see themselves as leaders who can break through societal and cultural barriers imposed on them.

Kathy Wilson

Gowanus Creek Nature Hike

Katie Adee

A mobile web app for identifying, cataloging, and mapping the flora of the Gowanus Canal Area. By looking at current species, we can begin to imagine the future Gowanus as an ecosystem, not just an environmental disaster or real estate investment.

http://gowanusflora.herokuapp.com/

Description

Gowanus Creek Nature Hike is a web tool for scientists, students, and Gowanus enthusiasts to explore the species that have managed to survive and thrive near our local Superfund Site, the Gowanus canal. A user spots a tree, answers a few questions about its appearance, and is presented with a catalog of possible species, including hand-drawn images and interesting facts. Once a species has been identified, a user can report the plant type and location. This data is then presented as a web map, catalog, and as a GeoJSON API for others to explore or use in their own research and artistic ventures. Participation in the reporting process will hopefully increase knowledge and awareness of one's natural surroundings.

Nancy Hechinger

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.

Katherine Dillon

Visual Sound Synthesis

Louise Foo

Visual Sound Synthesis is a series of image-sound explorations of the meeting between graphic design and a program that turns the iPhone camera into an optical synthesizer that plays what it sees.

visualsoundsynthesis.com

Description

With roots in research about historical optical sound devices like the ANS synthesizer, Oramics, Sound-On-Film techniques and the Pattern Playback Synthesizer I asked myself – how can I experience this image-sound translation myself today with the technology available to me? and how can I share this with others? Through a process of programming, interface prototype design, listening to images and looking at sounds and finally through collaboration with a graphic designer – the final outcome is a series of 'scores' played back by the viewer with the camera in the iPhone. The installation of those 'scores' explore how in many ways the visual and audible senses are related, but not necessarily synchronized.

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.

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.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Google Made Me Do It

Mary Fê

My goal was to create an alternative way of PLAYING (as in actor play and as in game play) in an immersive live editable performance, where audience and performer could interact and interfere on the outcomes in real time at a collective space.

Description

I combined new media and improv elements to find the interactive mechanics of live scene story telling. If we can navigate through different content online and discover new approaches on information, would an audience be able to modify live plots as well by using search engines?
Google Made Me Do It was performed at The Silent Barn on April of 2014.
Voice Search Hot Word engine listened to shouts from the audience (a tradition on improv) to jump start scenes. Professional actors on stage could signal for audience help at any moment by wheeling an umbrella as in a frozen computer monitor. Shouts of Ok Google triggered word search during the scenes to flip plots. Who should we point for the results? Google made us do it!

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.

Katherine Dillon

CHI Juice

Hanna Moon

CHI Juice is a mobile application to make healthy home-made juice with suggested ingredients from Traditional Chinese Medicine methods. It helps to find good ingredients for your body and checks up health status of your internal organs.

http://chi-juice.com

Description

CHI Juice app is a self-diagnosis system with skin conditions. Chinese face mapping is part of Traditional Chinese Medicine and brings forth the idea that different parts of your face correspond to specific internal organs. So you can check out your problem areas and the underlying imbalances. This app detects positions of acnes or pimples on your face and gets data from Chinese face mapping to determine which internal organs are related to the positions of the acnes.Then it would show you ingredients which contains nutrition what your body needs to consume. Then you can select ingredients you want to add to your healthy juice. It shows amounts of each ingredients you need to put and has its own nutrition facts related to the ingredients.