Category Archives: Class

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.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Jewliebots: open-source programmable jewelry

Maria Paula Saba

Jewliebots introduce software education to teenaged girls in a way that is appealing to them. It is a set of neat jewelry and wearables that girls can program to change their appearance and behavior while they seamlessly learn programming.

Description

Jewliebots is an open source library of wearables that allows users to customize their own electronic jewelry through a graphical interface. The main goal is to engage and increase teenaged girls' interest in the workings of technology by showing them that programming can be also beautiful.
Jewliebots is fashionable and attractive for the target group of 13+. The hardware include LEDs, buttons and sensors that might significantly change aesthetics of the jewel according to the code. The jewel can be customized by generating the algorithms through a block-programming style language, like Scratch, that should be uploaded to the jewel. Circuits are embedded in 3D printed cases, baked polymer clay and laser-cut parts.
http://jewliebots.com

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.

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.