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
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…
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.
Wandering around the oldest Chinatown, I constantly heard Mahjong sounds in between alleys through the inner Chinatown. Later I found that there are at least forty Mahjong club rooms hidden within — the Mahjong gambling culture has carried through since the 1850s.
I redesigned the Chinatown map by adopting Mahjong's elements. Moreover, the board game serves as a combination of Mahjong and monopoly: four players would have different character identifications and storylines based on the effects of historical events. Instead of rolling dices, the players will take turns and push the buttons on the board to let the LEDs indicate where the characters should go. Once arrived at the location on the Chinatown map, the avatar will trigger “the switch”(by connecting the copper tapes) of the location and the historical story of this place sill unfold as the p5.js projecting the visuals along with the audios (mahjong playing noises) I recorded in Chinatown.
The Kaleidoscope Band is a shared experience, through a new form of a toy that combines both a kaleidoscope and a music box.
This kaleidoscope band is using an analog music box as input to change the projected kaleidoscope pattern through P5.js. As turning the knob of the music box, through a potentiometer, the pattern of the kaleidoscope would change over time through the projector along with the beautiful music sung along from the box.
Combining technology and crafts, we fabricate the box through wood and tried to deliver the nostalgic traditional toy that everyone is familiar with on top of creating the kaleidoscope pattern through a digital platform.
The Mr. Scribbles Dancing Drawing Robot was created to help people feel more comfortable about their bodies, about their movements — about being weird sometimes. Dancing Drawing Robot is a robot, controlled using dance poses.
zoom link:
https://nyu.zoom.us/j/91942675074?pwd=Sm13YzQyVm9abEFUOXlFdUsrSk8rUT09
GO TO
https://midi-sender.herokuapp.com/
OR CLICK PROJECT WEBSITE TO PLAY THE DRUMS YOURSELF!
I have collected, arranged, and hung 7 percussive and sonic objects in and array around the listener's ear, be it a human or electronic eardrum. To each object is attached a solenoid motor which will strike the object, and I will control this striking both live with buttons and by creating rhythmic MIDI clips in Ableton Live. I'll then explore the vocabulary of sounds possible with my room-sized instrument, incorporating it into musical performance, perhaps on its own, played and manipulated by multiple people, and with other sound sources, for instance a pitch-detecting harmonizer I created, or just an acoustic instrument like the bass clarinet. If I have time and luck I'll make it possible for spectators to trigger the sculpture over the web.
Space-mapper car is a tiny car––less than 5×9″ large––that uses IR distance sensors to detect walls and objects in its surrounding area and map them out on screen. Using two N20 encoded gear motors, the car can accurately track its movement speed and angle and transmit them through serial communication to p5.js, which can use the information, along with the data from its 2 Sharp IR distance sensors, to gradually piece together a rough map of the space.
The user can choose between 2 modes, each curating a different interaction between the physical space and the on-screen map. In the first mode, the car will fill out a map of its surrounding space on screen, as described above. In the second, more entertaining mode, a path will be drawn on screen for the robot to follow, and a series of lines will be drawn parallel to the prescribed path. The user will have to place a series of objects along the car's physical path in order to match the on-screen map as best as possible. The two modes therefore allow for bi-directional interaction between the car's physical space and its on-screen replication; the physical space dictates the on-screen map in the first mode, and vice-versa in the second mode.
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.
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.