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It Could Be Next Time (There Is No Next Time)

Nikhil Kumar

Interactive poem and musical composition reflecting on emotional attachment, impermanence and decay.

https://nikhilkumar.media

Description

It Could Be Next Time explores the relationship between emotional attachment, impermanence and decay through sound and interaction. The audience plays an important role in unlocking sequences of music and spoken word during the performance.

The physical piece is built with orange peels in various states of freshness and decay. When an orange peel is pulled out of a switch and buried in soil, spoken audio– thoughts and memories in various states of freshness and decay– and associated music begins to play. As the sculpture is disassembled, the poem and music becomes more complete. Ultimately, after the physical structure is undone and the orange peels are returned to the soil, the intangible poem/sounds continue to exist.

Audience members can interact with It Could Be Next Time at various stages of its lifecycle and will themselves contribute to the order in which the piece plays. Chance is an important component, and the coherence of the experience for an audience member at any snapshot in time will depend in part on when and how they interact with the piece.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Healthy Data Starts Here

Dana Elkis, Matthew Ross

we frequently take the time to use hand sanitzers to clean our hands, with our intervention we allow people to take the time to easily clean the data from their phones.

https://

Description

The aim of our project is to allow people to take control of their browser hygiene.

Our installation takes the form of a very common object: the free-standing Purell hand sanitizer.

We are augmenting a sanitizer so that the user is able to place a cellphone into a bay. Once the person places their hand under the sensor as they would normally do to clean their hands, a small robotic arm is activated and goes through the steps to phone browser history and session cookies.

Classes

Designing for Live Performance

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蜃楼 Mirage

Lyujiang Chen

This project allows users to draw a paint and compose a song with body movement in real time working with multiple machine learning models.

https://spark.adobe.com/page/ZPgK1gIDWxnh6/

Description

A camera will capture the movement of the user's hand which will be used as the stroke data for the Spade-coco model. The projector will project the real-time window of the output of the spade-coco model, a colored landscape view, for the user to generate real-time pictures. The camera will also capture the Posenet data to tone.js to generate music in real-time. After defining the start and end, the grogram will send the whole music piece to Rnn model to generate a mix version with a chosen piece to make the work more musical. As a result of the whole system, there will be a song with an album cover. The video is the demo of the whole project, allowing the user to paint with no mouse and turn the stroke on and off when left-hand gets close to the right-hand.

Classes

Introduction to Machine Learning for the Arts (UG)

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the hour glass

Julian Mathews

A persistence of vision LED sculpture meant to help visualize climate change statistics

https://

Description

I created a persistence of vision LED sculpture, that consists of two stacked globes, which is designed to be used as a statistics visualizer, in this case for climate change. The user will toggle through 10-12 statistics about climate change on a p5.js sketch, which will have a correlating visual on the sculpture. Shaped like an hour glass to symbolize the waning time we have left to solve this issue of climate change.

Examples:

– A statistic about the extinction of bees will have the sculpture light up yellow & black.
– A statistic about how India has emerged as a global leader in renewable energy will correlate to the sculpture lighting up as the Indian flag.
– A statistic that shows sea levels in 1950 will light up 1/3 of the sculpture blue.
– The following statistic will show sea levels in 2019, which will light up 2/3 of the sculpture blue.

This is meant to be an awareness project. I thought to myself: how can I get people’s attention on a serious issue? My solution: a glowing ball of LED lights. This is ultimately meant to be an example of playful communication of (somewhat) serious research. A prototype and concept that I would love to expand one day. Ideally, this could be shown in a somewhat darkened room, but the lights work fine in light, thank you for your consideration.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Kusama's Reality

Abby Ausmus, Lilian Yang

Yayoi Kusama’s theories and art brought to fruition in an infinite virtual universe.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17R9XQ_xXUDRjy46K59dPMIv–8BC7z0TOHmp8fUPW5c/edit?usp=sharing

Description

One visitor enters at a time, into a room covered in mirrors: floors, ceilings and walls. As the door closes behind them, along with the world, the now dark room is lit only by small circular LED lights descending from the ceiling. The person becomes an integral part of the piece, invited to ponder their place in the universe as they stare at the infinite number of reflections of themselves. Among the seemingly countless particles, they feel almost lost in the room, until their humanness is what the artist likes to call “obliterated.” The observer feels themselves become one with the lights scattered across the room, as the person too is scattered all over the room. And yet, an enchanted and uplifting existentialism consumes them.

Contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama explores the concept of infinity and existentialism in her works. She calls her ideas about existentialism “obliteration,” the idea that everything can be broken down into infinite particles. Her installations often simulate an infinite space, littered with repetitive polka dots and lights, creating a sense of awe and tranquility.

We based our work off some of her installations, and her theoretical claims such as we are one particle amongst infinitely many others, just as our planet is one particle amongst infinitely many others. In addition, we incorporated her theory that dots obliterate us and our environment into infinity, uniting us with our surroundings.

This virtual reality experience is meant to mirror Kusama’s reality as a single particle amongst many, allowing the user to feel engulfed by a world of dots and patterns. Exploring various environments with interactive objects, the user experiences hallucinations similar to those described by Kusama, navigating through a journey about life before death in a virtual space.

Classes

Immersive Experiences (UG)

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Around Us

Jaekook Han, Jiwon Shin

Around Us is an interactive website, zine and set of cards visualizing the satellites around us that are currently in use.

http://jiwonshin.com/around-us/

Description

In spirit Lisa Park’s Stuff You Can Kick: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures, we are investigating the infrastructure of satellites launched in the year 2018 – 19. Satellites have become one of the most essential infrastructures that make distribution of media possible and like most media infrastructures, the extent of the structure is hard to be visually represented in one glance and no human can physically see the whole infrastructure. To add to this difficulty of visualizing infrastructures, satellites, once launched to the Earth’s orbit, are no longer visible to the human eye. Around Us raises awareness of these satellites that comprise an important infrastructure to digital media communications.

Classes

Data Art

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Echo of Silence

Son Luu

In a world that is getting noisier with the excessive use of machines, Echo of Silence tells viewers about the under-appreciated power of uninterrupted silence.

https://www.sonluu.com/post/echo-of-silence

Description

Echo of Silence is a kinetic sculpture, consists of a clear box hung from the ceiling, containing lighting equipment and kinetic components that are activated only in silent or low noise-leveled environment. The sculptural components include LED lights, a fixed tuning fork and a solenoid. Noise level is constantly measured and analyzed in real time against a pre-set threshold. Above the noise threshold, the kinetic sculpture pauses all of its activities (lights switches off and all movements stop). As noise level returns to below the threshold, the lights turn back on; the solenoid starts generating timely mechanic pulses against the tuning fork to create a long, echoing sound, amplified by the box itself. For about a minute long, viewers feel more connected to the environment and the humans around them in a common physical space, while listening closely to the intriguing, yet meditative, echoing sound generated by the tuning fork.

Classes

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Web Olympic

Shiyu Chen, Vibert Thio

Get exercise with simple and fun web-based games. For instance, play whack a mole with your nose👃.

https://vibertthio.com/posenet-whack-a-mole/

Description

We see people are spending a lot of time on their screen and in the shop but didn't get a chance to exercise. So we created a game to get people to move in front of the screen, or simply just get away from your work for a little while and exercise in a fun way. “Whack a Mole” is a physical game developed with PoseNet. And we aim to build a series of fun and simple web-based games, thus “Web Olympic”.

Classes

Machine Learning for the Web

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Bouncing Ball Karaoke

Erik van Zummeren

Bouncing Ball Karaoke is a Bluetooth enabled bouncing ball slash karaoke machine

https://

Description

Bouncing Ball Karaoke is a combination between a Bluetooth enabled bouncing ball and a karaoke machine. This specific installation is both a sample use case of how Bluetooth enabled bouncing balls can have a positive impact on our lives, as well as a way to have fun.

The concept for the karaoke machine is a modern interpretation of the bouncing ball device that was invented by Max Fleischer in 1924. Every time the user bounces the physical bouncing ball the 'lyric ball' heads to the next part of the song. The closer the user is to the original timing of the song, the more points the user gets.

However, a big part of this installation is also about empowering these voices that have long been neglected and unheard of in the karaoke scene. This installation enables everyone to perform karaoke. For instance, this installation will feature A-ha's Take on me, which can be considered as one of Europe's biggest treasures in its rich musical history. This song is notoriously difficult to sing in real life due to A-ha's Morten Harket majestic voice which reaches five different octaves. However, with Bouncing Ball Karaoke everyone can be Morten Harket and world-famous for 5 minutes in their life.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Love at First Sight

Michael Yang, Zoe Wells, Robert Ye

Multiplayer eye-contact based game exploring connection and betrayal.

https://wp.nyu.edu/zoejbw/2019/12/03/love-at-first-sight-collective-play/

Description

Love at First Sight is a game with 5-7 people, each using their phones as controllers (using a glitch URL), and a scoreboard on a large screen. At the beginning of each round, the players stand in a circle and have 30 seconds to communicate only via eye contact, looking to each other for connection, trustworthiness, and to establish unspoken agreements for matching. At the end of the time, they are each prompted to choose which other player they want to match with via their phones. The scoreboard tallies up the points: one point for receiving an unrequited match request (rejection), two points for a mutual match, and three points for matching with someone new. As the rounds go by, players will have to decide what risks they are willing to take, who they trust, and who to break the trust of. Can you look into someone’s eyes and lie about your intentions? Will you betray a partner just for some made up points?

Classes

Collective Play (UG)