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The Audiences

Yuan Chen

This sculpture create an illusion for people that who is the audience and who is the performer.

http://www.yuan12.com/work/#/the-audiences/

Description

This is an interactive sculpture with handmade clay characters. There are 48 of them sitting on the stairs like the audiences in a theater, watching people passing by in front of them with turning their head to follow and making reaction to knocking sound around them. It creates the illusion that they are alive and they are the audiences, and you are the performer in their views. It tries to bring people humor and joy, give the question that if you are in the position or role you think you are in daily life.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing ITPG-GT.2301.001

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Threads

Aaron Parsekian, Lisa M Jamhoury

Threads is an interactive performance experience that breaks down the barrier between audience and performer by exposing the body’s vital signs as visualisations.

http://lmj.io/category/fall2016/big-screens/

Description

While much has been done with revealing the physical body through motion capture in performance art, less has been done in taking into account closer readings from the body. In this experience, performers wear sensors measuring electrography—specifically electromyography (EMG) and electrocardiography (EKG). The data is transmitted wirelessly and combined. The resulting data is represented visually and sonically in real time. In this way, the performer’s body electric lights the performance environment. Threads currently measures EKG (heart rate) with Polar heart rate bands, and EMG (muscle electric) with MyoWare Electromyography sensors. The data from these sensors is then sent over a wireless serial bridge to a computer providing algorithmic visuals made in Processing. Each sensor has added wearable lighting to show the sensor readings in real time.

Classes

Data Art, Big Screens, Designing for Live Performance

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Tangled

Esther Hersh

A set of necklaces that communicate with each other through bluetooth. When one necklace is held, the other lights up.

http://www.estherhershitp.com/necklace-complete-pcb/

Description

When I was growing up I was told that if the clasp of your necklace flipped around and touched your necklace charm, it meant that your soulmate was thinking about you. While that might be a strange notion, Jewelry is is given as a display of affection and wearing that jewelry tends to remind people of the person who gave it to them. We’ve been trying to use technology to bridge gaps between people for a long time and have only managed to create feelings of isolation. A screen cannot replace touch. When you’re apart there are only so many “thinking of you” texts that you’re going to send and it seems like such an inadequate way to communicate to someone that you feel their absence.I wanted to create an interaction that is both visual and physical but just as subtle as the kissing clasp and charm. You might not notice it every time, but when someone is thinking about you, you would experience a warmth and see a light.

Classes

Project Development Studio

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Structural Circuits

Dorothy Chi Hung Lam

Structural circuits is a way of rethinking circuits and sculpting with electricity.

http://www.dorothylamzihong.com/single-post/2016/12/09/Interactive-Circuits

Description

Structural circuits is a way of rethinking and sculpting electricity. The circuits are autonomous, which when completed in parallel will create a larger form, and perhaps eventually grow into circuit organisms.

Unlike other circuits where the goal is to be as efficient as possible and be concealed, there are no hidden parts in Structural Circuits; every component exists as a part of the form as well as to perform a function. It is the parallel of utility and aesthetics.

A virtual 3-dimensional model will be generated in Processing and is an integral part of the project as

in understanding the shapes, forms and circuits.

Classes

Basic Analog Circuits

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E-Books

Laura Kerry

A play on the notion of electronic texts, the "E-Books" device uses technology (RFID, light and photoresistors, switches, and aprojected p5.js sketch) in combination with print books to concretize the hidden stories embedded in physical pages—when books were acquired, where they have traveled, and what they have signified to those who have carried them.

http://ebooks.laurakerry.com

Description

There’s a popular belief that technology will drive print books to extinction. What if, instead, we could use technology to emphasize the unique experience of reading and possessing physical texts?

The “E-Books” device seeks to do exactly that. When the user places a book affixed with an RFID sticker on the device platform, an RFID/NFC reader in the platform activates a light and p5.js sketch that narrates the story of that particular text. As she passes pages between the light and a light sensor on the opposite side of the page, she triggers slides with writing and images associated with the book—a specific stain or dog-eared corner, an inscription, or a memory associated with a chapter or sentence. The slides will project over the book onto a surface behind the device to underscore the idea that the stories arise from the pages themselves.

Comprised of a collection of books contributed by friends and family, “E-Books” tells the stories of a first-edition Our Bodies, Ourselves, a deteriorating boy scout handbook, books borrowed and lent in friendship and wooing, and other texts that will sit in a stack beside the device for the user to peruse. As a final step, the project will invite users to contribute their own stories about their cherished books on a website. Physical books are more than the writing contained on their pages; “E-Books” harnesses technology to bring to life the secondary stories embedded in them.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing ITPG-GT.2301.005

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Time Tunnel Machine

Roxanne Kim

Travel through the Time Tunnel Machine!

https://roxannekimblog.wordpress.com/category/phycomp/

Description

Time Tunnel Machine is the interactive immersive installation that gives you people to feel going somewhere through the pedaling.

Before I started this project, my curiosity is on interactive media installation. From that point, I researched how to combine the user's interaction and media. According to my testing, lights is the effective way to represent the user's interaction as a feedback.

In terms of the theme, by acting of riding a bike, users can feel like going somewhere – ideally it was supposed to go to the past – but it's ambiguous to represent where(what time) they are. However, users can still control the time speed and the light tunnel reflects it. This experience encourages people to feel time traveling.

Personally, through this project, I want to explore how to control sensors and lights – specifically Neopixels as well as how the immersive media works.

(I WILL BUIL UP THIS MORE)

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media ITPG-GT.2233.006, Introduction to Physical Computing ITPG-GT.2301.001

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Liquid Light

Jeffrey Park, Yeseul Song

An interactive toy in which light imitates water!

http://www.jeff-park.com/2016/12/05/winter-show-proposal-liquid-light/

Description

Yeseul and I were both interested in creating a light sculpture for our midterm, and we decided to use a gyro sensor to use light to imitate water. This toy is a concept for a larger version that we would like to build sometime and place in Washington Square Park. This toy will change color depending on different behaviors, such as picking it up or tossing it in the air.

Continuing on my theme from my final project, we want to explore different ways in which a viewer can control “nature.” In my pcomp final project, Endless Winter, we use ultrasound sensors to control wind and snow. For this midterm, we use light and gravity to imitate controlling water.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing ITPG-GT.2301.003

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The Conversation

Yuan Gao

The Conversation is a piece of artwork in which two chat bots, assuming the dubious characters of Donald Trump and Slavoj Žižek, engage themselves in an imaginary yet real, futile yet meaningful, transient yet endless conversation.

https://github.com/821760408-sp/the-conversation

Description

The Conversation is the title for a piece of artwork in which two chat bots engage themselves in an imaginary yet real, futile yet meaningful, transient yet endless conversation.

These chat bots are not faceless, undistinguishable digital creatures of the most common type. Each of the chat bots assumes the identity of a real-life person, hence can be seen/understood as a fragmented and singular embodiment of the character it's impersonating.

The core algorithm of the chat bots are implemented with a retrieval-based machine learning model, meaning that each of them has a collection of pre-determined responses from which the most relevant sentence will be chosen as a response to the context of the conversation thus far.

The collection of responses of each bot, the utterances, are gathered from publicly available TV footages of interview/lecture/talk of each of the real-life characters, invariably showing them speaking while facing the camera/screen. As many utterances as possible will be reaped from each footage, on the condition of each utterance being valid in grammatical structure and coherent in meaning. These “unit” utterances/footages form the database of possible responses for each bot in communication.

The final response at any given point in the conversation by either party is selected by evaluating a subset of all possible responses (algorithmically decided) against the context of the conversation, i.e. the corpus of all utterances from both sides up to now from a certain point in the past. A Long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture of machine learning is used to train a model and evaluate those potential responses therewith, from which the one with the highest score is chosen as the final response to the other interlocutor.

The bots will be dwelling in Raspberry Pis sitting side by side, talking to each other over network. Portable RPi screens will be used to show those footages-as-response.

Classes

Learning Machines: Theory to Practice