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Sirens

Dana Elkis

Since the day I was born I heard a total of 673 minutes of sirens = 11 hours and 22 minutes.

https://pinkeey9.wixsite.com/danaelkisblog/blog/sirens

Description

When a siren goes off, you have 60 seconds to find the safest spot available, it could be the staircase in, a safe-room in your house, a shelter in the building or sometimes just lying on the ground and protecting your head. Then you wait. Waiting in silence for the boom to come.

I edited all these sirens into one long musical piece, Some of the sirens presented in my project are part of the israeli culture to commemorate and some are provided as an emergency warning of a danger like in war times.
For every siren presented I collected all the information I could access . The information contains: the city, address, year, the current event that brought on the siren and sometimes a memory I could recall. The sound of every siren accompanies it’s related data as well as a live surveillance camera documenting the location it was heard in today.

It’s all about this moment of waiting for something to happen.

My project contain 4 main elements:
csv file with all the data that i collected, 11 hours and 22 minutes of sirens in one music piece
8 live cameras from israel (whom i had to hack a little bit to get access to)
And a print version of the sound wave of the 673 minutes of the sirens.
The book will be 800 pages thick, hard cover. Black and white printing. 120gsm uncoated paper.

*the probject runs on a local server on my computer

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media

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Memory Monster

Carol Chen, Wenjing Liu

A website to share your memory of childhood and see how your memory and others' will affect how the memory monster looks like.

https://

Description

Human grow, learn and establish their identity through the past stories they experienced and the memories they stored. Sometimes people who has negative past experience want to erase such memories. But should they erased such memories, are they who they were? Based on these thoughts, we want to create a creature whose identities are defined by the collective memories of a group (like ITP). Its characteristics and look will vary based on what users share.

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Computational Media

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Dance Floor MPC

Adi Dahiya

A playful dance floor experience which allows anyone to make beats with their body.

https://adi.pizza/slices/dance-floor-mpc/

Description

I'm making a matrix of dance floor tiles which act as a controller for a drum rack sampler & step sequencer. The software implements some of the key ideas from an Akai MPC and modern production workstations like Ableton. Users are invited to step up to the device, express themselves with a little dance over a 2- or 4-bar phrase, and hear back the resulting rhythm produced by the “Dance floor MPC”. Successive users can choose to “collaborate” with the previous user's recorded sequence. This is not a precise production tool, but rather a playful experience which enables anyone to enjoy making beats with their body.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing, The Code of Music

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Data Structures

Lydia Jessup

In a world of “big data,” what story will you choose to tell when you have the controls?

https://lydiapjessup.tumblr.com/tagged/icm2018

Description

This piece invites viewers to control data visualizations on 5in x 5in cubes representing different neighborhoods in Chicago. The viewer sees shapes, colors and patterns appear on the cubes as they move the controls and can see how neighborhoods differ from one another through these abstract representations of the data. Pulled from the Chicago Data Portal from domains such as health, the economy, education and the environment, these data tell a story – and the viewer gets to decide what that story is. In an era of “big data,” this piece invites viewers to question the multiple filters and curation that data go through in collection, analysis and presentation and how this determines the narrative we choose to tell about places and the people who live there.

This piece is an exploration of different ways of viewing and interacting with data beyond screen-based and more literal data visualizations. The viewer has a control panel with sliders that control the size or “weight” of each data type. The control panel will also have instructions for how to use it and an explanation of the type of data displayed. The color scheme is taken from data analysis software editors as a reference to the piece giving people without a coding background the ability to manipulate data. The neighborhoods will not be labeled to allow the viewer to abstract the visualizations and imagine the city or neighborhood where they live or where they are from.

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media

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The Music Box

David Azar

Compose different music arrangements with and old-school computer and punch cards

https://www.davidazar.mx/blog/the-music-box

Description

The Music Box is a project about music and abstract tangible interaction.

Technology has moved into a 2D space filled with screens. Sure, VR and AR are making an effort to make hybrid spaces between the physical and digital world, but screen of some sort is needed.

I am offering an exploration on music arrangement, inspired by old-school computing elements and based heavily on tangible interaction.

There are 15 different punch cards that users can insert in one of 12 slots. Depending on where that card is and its type, a sample of sound is played. Users can stack 3 different samples at a time, and they can be rhythmic, harmonic or melodic. Each section has three different instrument sounds.

This is a tool/exploration for musical composition.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing, The Code of Music

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Vo-5ynth

Tushar Goyal

Generative music instrument that makes music algorithmically from the users voice

https://wp.nyu.edu/tushargoyal/2018/12/05/vo-5ynth/

Description

Vo-5ynth, pronounced “vo-synth” (short for “voice-synthesizer in p5”) is a music instrument, but, its not a an ordinary one. First it doesn't have a sound of its own. Instead, it uses the users voice to make music. Second, its a generative music instrument so it doesn't give the user complete control over the music making process, instead, it encourages the user to (in a way) collaborate with the instrument (“the machine”) to make music. The user can define the pool of notes from which music can be generated but the actual output (notes for the bass, melody, harmony) is generated algorithmically by the instrument. The user can change the selected notes in real time to change how the music sounds and can thus, play this as an instrument that can be performed live or be used as an ideation tool, or just for fun really!

Classes

Intro to Fabrication, Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing, The Code of Music

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Game of life – Eco

Sid Chou

A Cellular automaton for the ecosystem.

https://sidchoublog.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/icm-week-9/

Description

The cellular automaton I’m creating, different from the well known Conway’s Game of Life, it models the entire ecosystem. On the canvas, the following categories of species are modeled, vegetation, herbivore, carnivore, in addition of a landscape element, river.

A new world will be generated every time the game start with river and vegetation. The player plays as a “God”, which they place species of herbivore and carnivore on the field. After amount of time, “human” will be introduced into the world, and start consuming the resource. When the resource was out, the cell will turn gray and be in the permanent dead state, while all the resources are used out, it is game over.

The player can strategically place carnivor to fight and human on the canvas; however, carnivores consume herbivor, and herbivore consume vegetation, so it also use up resource on its own. The goal is find a good balance to sustain the game as long as possible without using up the resource.

The game most likely to end up all the resource being used, it is intend to be almost impossible to achieve equilibrium which is meant to make the user consider about our impact to the environment.

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media

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Code to Racist Technologies

Winnie Yoe

"Code to Racist Technologies" is a project about implicit racial bias and colorism, and a subversive argument against technologies developed without thoughtful considerations of implications.

https://www.winnieyoe.com/icm/racist-webcam

Description

“Code to Racist Technologies” is a project about implicit racial bias and colorism. It is also a subversive argument against technologies developed without thoughtful considerations of implications. The project is inspired by Ekene Ijeoma’s Ethnic Filter, Joy Buolamwini’s research “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification” and Dr. Safiya Noble’s talk “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism” at Data & Society.

As machine learning is increasingly infiltrating aspects of our society, it is important to recognize how our biases, in this case, implicit racial bias, are translated to technologies we design, and how that could lead to drastic and often detrimental effects.

The project, in form of an interface experience is two-folded. User first completes an implicit bias association test, which I partially adapted from a test developed by researchers from Harvard, UVA and University of Washington. Once completed, user enter section two, where they find out their probability of developing a racist technology and how this technology they develop will affect people of different skin tones. What the user does not know is that none of their test results are recorded. In fact, their test result always shows that they prefer light-skin relative to dark-skin, with a random percentage from 80-90% that they will develop a racist technology.

Initially, the project only consist of section 2, a “racist webcam” that isolates skin tone from the background, determines where the skin tone falls on the Fitzpatrick Skin Type Classification, then map the value and change the degree of pixelation in the user's webcam capture. The darker your skin tone is, the more pixelated your video appears, and the less visible you are. The layout of the program is designed that each time it runs, the user’s video capture will be shown alongside eight pre-recorded videos. The juxtaposition of the user’s experience with the other participants’ heightens the visual metaphor of the effects of racial bias on one’s visibility and voice.

My goal for this project, and the reason why I added section 1, is because I hope that users will realize all of us are bias, and it is only with a very conscious awareness that we will stop creating racist technologies that bring detrimental effects.

What is the code to racist technologies? The code is you and me, especially the you and me who assume because we are “liberal” and “progressive”, we are not or will not be a part of the problem.

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media

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IMERSA

Marcela Mancino von der Osten

We are so grateful for being together here, but still, it was never this hard to connect. Every word has a thousand unspoken words behind them. We look into each other's eyes and we see the infinity that separates us. We try to find a way to reach each other, but we get lost in the moving topography. It is frightening, but its colors and textures are so fascinating that we just let go. We give up the words. We stare into our shared infinity, we dive.

https://https://mardefronteira.wordpress.com/2018/11/11/final-project-proposal/

Description

We are so grateful for being together here, but still, it was never this hard to connect. Every word has a thousand unspoken words behind them. We look into each other's eyes and we see the infinity that separates us. We try to find a way to reach each other, but we get lost in the moving topography. It is frightening, but its colors and textures are so fascinating that we just let go. We give up the words. We stare into our shared infinity, we dive.

IMERSA is an interactive sculpture that explores the implications of my experience in reterritorializing in the USA, specially considering the political situation that I have left behind in Brazil and how hard it is to create empathy in people for things that are so far from their realities. No matter how much we all try, there is something that gets lost in our living experiences and will never go through.

This piece relates to that by asking the user to dedicate attention, patience and intimacy for the experience to happen, but making it so long that no one would wait for the whole experience to happen. The sculpture – consisting of crystal strings, mirrors, light and sound – is only activated when it tracks a single person looking at it. While the person is there, the piece builds itself up slowly, using motors to bring the strings into a physical sculpture which receives increasing amounts of movement through light and sound. If another person is tracked, the system pauses, leaving the sculpture in the same place as it was. If the person leaves, the sculpture immediately resets, bringing the crystals to fall down, and the lights and sound to be turned off.

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing