Total President

Shivanku Kumar Fnu

The president-elect has some nasty things to say about you. Follow @realdonal to find out.

Description

The current political climate has become much like a reality TV. Instead of watching substantive news about our government and people who are running it, we are stuck in the vicious cycle of cheap entertainment. Much like a reality TV, creating controversy is appreciated by the media and is given insane amount of coverage. The rise of Donald Trump can be linked to this phenomenon. He understood this and gave the media and the people what they wanted.

This twitter bot is a parody on the same. All the followers of the bot get constantly engaged in a reality TV like insulting and gossip by the bot.

Classes

Hacking Contemporary Political Rhetoric

Alaska

Shivanku Kumar Fnu, Eric W Li

An interactive sculpture that incites conversations around climate change and human influence.

https://www.wenqili.com/blog/alaska

Description

Climate change has been accepted as the greatest threat to the existence of humans on planet earth. While there are some deniers of this extensively proven fact whats more concerning is the apathy of the ones who do accept it. The attitude is clear, unless a violent storm comes to our doorstep, we will not care and by then it will already be too late. This attitude is present in all of us and is fatal for all of us.

Many science authors, scientists, film makers, politicians, journalists have tried to beat this attitude by making powerful appeals to people. Nothing seems to have a lasting impact. Our project makes no such attempt. Our idea is not to try another way of making people understand. Instead, our project is an attempt at cynicism and mockery of the short sighted attitude described above.

“How obvious and directly related to human action does the impact of climate change have to be, for people to finally understand the gravity of the situation.”

For our project, we decided to focus on Alaska’s Glacier Bay. It is home to over 100,000 glaciers, 95% of which are currently thinning. We created a dynamic sculpture that mimics the peaks at Alaska Glaciers and destroys itself instantaneously, and almost comically, in response to any user interaction with it.

Classes

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