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Breathe IN/OUT, Float UP/DOWN

Devices that enhance meditative experiences in both remote and physical locations, acknowledging that meditation is a communal, multi-sensory practice.

Eden Chinn, Lucas Wozniak, Mee Ko, Rajshree Saraf,

https://youtu.be/DWl0pBt_lhw

Description

The user wears a belt with a stretch sensor attached, measuring the user’s breath. As the stretch sensor moves with the expansion of the chest, its data is recorded and utilized to manipulate remote and physical objects. There are two variations on this output for our project:

REMOTE/SERVER COMMUNICATION: Different people can wear breath sensors in different locations. Together, their breathing patterns create an output on p5. In our p5 sketch, the breathing is signified by a feather animation moving up and down. Both users' breathing patterns create this change collaboratively.

PHYSICAL INSTALLATION: The stretch sensor allows breath to become a controller that manipulates physical phenomena. An installation of yarn pompoms is suspended from a frame and moves in reaction to the wearer’s inhalation and exhalation.

Zoom link:
https://nyu.zoom.us/j/99001077668

p5 link:
https://editor.p5js.org/mnk2970/sketches/ylgyvcaia

ITPG-GT.2301.00008
Intro to Phys. Comp.
Art,Wearables
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Exquisite Corpse (2020)

A digital take on the Surrealist drawing game…for the age of wearable tech.

Ami Mehta

https://ami-mehta.github.io/ExquisiteCorpse/

Description

Exquisite Corpse (2020) is an interactive installation inspired by the original Surrealist drawing game, Exquisite Corpse, in which players take turns drawing body parts on a sheet of paper, folding it to conceal their contributions, and then passing it to the next person to add to.

In this remixed digital version, users are invited to collectively design an “Exquisite Corpse” for the age of wearable tech using their personal devices (e.g. smartphone and computer). Instead of generating pictures of a head, torso, or legs when the corresponding buttons are tapped, the site displays images of those body parts as transformed by wearables today. The resulting visual juxtapositions can be both amusing and absurd…

ITPG-GT.2301.00005
Intro to Phys. Comp.
Art,Play/Games
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Losing Teeth

An uncanny, interactive dental sculpture that plays and records intimate and disembodied audio of people talking about their anxieties surrounding the body.

Morgan Chen

https://vimeo.com/491468884

Description

Teeth dreams—dreams where your teeth fall out—are a common anxiety dream.

Teeth are strange: they fall out when you’re young, as a sign of growth, and they fall out when you’re old, as a sign of nearing death. Socially, we expect everyone to have every single tooth as a sign of good health. We pay money to get our natural teeth bleached, straightened and aligned—fake teeth if we’re missing a few, or we have weak or imperfect ones. Perhaps this is what makes teeth such a common, shared cultural anxiety dream. Teeth falling out is a sign of death and decay: it is a visible sign to others that something is going wrong with the body.

This interactive dental model plays with the idea of disembodied teeth and audio about body anxiety. In an intimate, confessional style, the project asks how we contend with the experience of having an ever-changing physical body.

ITPG-GT.2301.00008
Intro to Phys. Comp.
Art
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Listen to Yourself

When I look at the Starry Night and you look at the Starry Night, are we really looking at the same Starry Night?

Duncan Figurski, Rajshree Saraf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nRsuCBJmMs&feature=youtu.be

Description

I never liked the Mona Lisa. Or Gogh's Café Terrace at Night.
You know what else I never liked? The pressure to like a piece of art, because it supposed to be 'all that'. Oh, and the judgement when you don't get it. Blasphemy.
Everyone's experiences and personalities are different. What they like, feel, think, believe are different. How everyone experiences a piece of art is different. No two people look the same painting the same way – it speaks to each person differently. 
The painting here quizzes the viewer and the answers (or the viewer's personality) shapes what they see and hear. You might not like what you see, but I might love how I see the same thing.
We just want people to listen to themselves not base their judgement art critics or on accolades given by the ‘gate-keepers’ of art. 
We will place the screen in a fancy golden frame and we want people to have an intimate conversation with the painting when they come stand in front of it. It’ll ask questions to the viewer and they have to respond ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Their response (and their Spotify data) will change what they see. We want them to see how THEY inform the painting.
Yes, I love Hopper’s Nighthawks and Duncan loves the Mona Lisa. To each their own.
Try it out here: https://editor.p5js.org/rajshree.s/present/Xv8iT8w19

ITPG-GT.2233.00002
ICM
Culture,Art
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Light Up 2020

An interactive miniature installation that invites people to take a peek at normal people’s daily life under quarantine.

Jingyao Shao, Viola He

https://vimeo.com/489099811

Description

Light Up 2020 is an interactive miniature installation that uses light and projection to explore moments in mundane lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeing the silhouette of 4 people living in a neighboring building, the audience is given a flashlight to shine through their windows and reveal the residents in full color, eavesdropping on their conversations, interactions, and observing snippets of their day-to-day life.

We were inspired by our lockdown experiences in populated cities hard-hit by the pandemic — how our daily routines changed as we spent the majority of our days home alone, and how our relationships with our neighbors evolved. We read stories from Wuhan, Milan, New York City and beyond, about people coping with the lockdown through music, art, self-care, cheering for essential workers, and loving balcony exchanges with their neighbors. We hope to create a narrative, present in the form of an interactive installation utilizing paper model, light, and projection, to capture that spirit. We wrote and devised 4 stories with the help of some of our friends at ITP. Some characters come from our minds, some inspired by their own stories, brought to life through their improvisation acting. In this generic 3-story apartment building, you get to take a look at unique personalities, sending care to their loved ones, enjoying songs and movements, despite the unusual circumstances.

There’s also something inherently interesting about watching and being watched that comes with urban living where we can peak at people’s lives through their windows. The interaction of spotlighting through a window is, in turn, a discussion of our voyeuristic curiosity as human beings. Playing around with the scale, this miniature installation also offers an unprecedented intimate storytelling experience.

ITPG-GT.2301.00005
Intro to Phys. Comp.
Art,Narrative/Storytelling
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Asleep with One Eye Open – An Interactive Surveillance Sculpture

Asleep with One Eye Open is an interactive sculpture. It visualizes police surveillance through a visceral form factor that combines new technologies such as facial recognition and robotics with age-old motifs such as spiders and puppetry.

Daniel Johnston, Kevin He, Todd Whitney

https://vimeo.com/492099161

Description

Conversations and public understanding of police surveillance are clouded by the fact that surveillance is an abstraction for most. Even as surveillance reaches into all aspects of our lives, our conversations about its impact on our well being are understated.

Police are one of the most powerful surveillance agents in American society. Under public pressure over recent years, American police have started using body worn cameras (BCWs) and touting them as great transparency tools between police and the public. However, their use of BCWs raises new issues over who controls the images, when and how the cameras should be operated, should the cameras detect faces, etc.

We've used these questions to create an interactive sculpture that questions police power, surveillance, and our ability to confront these powers. Suspended from the ceiling, the humanoid sculpture dons a police tactical uniform draped with four BCWs. Its initial focal point is the realistic 3D printed face, generated with machine learning fed on the faces of American police union leaders. As the audience investigates the face they unwillingly create a threat to the sculpture and it responds. The body cameras open up, revealing themselves to be animatronic eyes that converge on the viewer. Even as you try to escape, the infrared eyes on the body cameras make it known that you can't avoid its gaze once you've been seen.

The sculpture is the first step in a larger installation about surveillance. By combining new technologies such as facial recognition and robotics with age-old motifs like spiders and puppetry, Asleep with One Eye Open creates visceral feelings and perspectives on surveillance that lets the viewer know that they cannot escape once the eyes have been centered on them.

ITPG-GT.2301.00001
Intro to Phys. Comp.
Art,Privacy/Security
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Tidal Observation Instrument

The Tidal Observation Instrument brings tides from around the globe into the audible range and allows their tones to mix and mingle.

Daniel Fries

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQQ2tiA1xrE

Description

The Tidal Observation Instrument starts with four tides. It uses historical data from the International Oceanographic Commission to log those tides as wavetables, and allows an instrumentalist to control the speed of the signal, from the native tidal frequency of 0.0000016Hz up to a more typical Low-Frequency Oscillator range of 0.01Hz. This LFO is allowed to modulate a sample of the waveform playing at 440Hz (Concert A). As the four tides play, it's possible to hear the last several days of tides across the globe resonate with each other, leading towards a strange new metaphor for the waves.

ITPG-GT.2040.001
Time
Sound,Art
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Doodle!

Exploring unique pen tools to draw with in an online canvas.

Abby Lee

https://youtu.be/kZ5JpsCC2Wc

Description

Inspired by the term “casual creator”, an alternate design space for tools which support creativity as a pleasurable activity rather than to accomplish tasks, I wanted to reimagine how to make drawing fun. Doodling is a past-time that has no specific outcome, so I channeled that into these pens. These pens were designed for users to feel wonder and curiosity about how they work, while also having fun exploring an online canvas. The blending pen is an exploration of shapes, textures and colors. The DNA pen is designed to be a fun introduction into science, with the idea of using DNA as a means of storing and transferring information.

ITPG-GT.2068.001
Hand Held: Creative Tools for Phones
Art,Mobile
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Don't Worry About That

A haunting and dystopian look at the cloud, Don't Worry About That is a performance by everyone's favorite voice assistant, Siri.

Dawn Sinkowski

https://vimeo.com/477738821

Description

A haunting and dystopian look at the cloud, Don't Worry About That is a performance by everyone's favorite voice assistant, Siri. The cloud, omnipresent and weightless, hanging above us all but actually mired in the earth. What does this light connectivity bring us? And what does it take away? A video collage is set to William Basinski's Disintegration Loop 1.1, Don't Worry About That tells a story through found footage.

ITPG-GT.2156.001
Socially Engaged Art and Digital Practice
Culture,Art
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The Trace.

The Trace is the project combined ICM and PC, and I try to capture the proof of existence with this project.

En-Tung Liu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=064WTEDT5nI&feature=youtu.be

Description

This project comes from questions: how can people exist, and how can existence be proven? So I combine the idea of long-exposure in photography with the p5 sketch and set the installation in a dark place. When the audience triggers the sketch, it will start to capture the audience's movement and draw the light trace on the dark canvas, and when the audience leaves, the trace will disappear.

ITPG-GT.2301.00002, ITPG-GT.2048.00005
Intro to Phys. Comp., ICM – Media
Performance,Art