Dig.it (pronounced 'dig (pause) it'), my thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, is a mobile app that allows users to make geolocated mix tapes for their friends.
A work in progress until May 16th, when I will present Dig.it as part of ITP's Thesis Week.
For now, whet your appetite with my User Flow and Blog Posts.
Lip Synch is an interactive video experience in which the user is able to control the speed two people kissing with her or his tongue, using a lollipop as the controller.
An accelerometer measuring the velocity of movement on the X and Y planes is connected to the end of a lollipop, and track the user's tongue movement speed. The faster the user moves her/his tongue, the faster the playback of audio & video. Slow tongue movements or stopping completely will result in a parallel effect on the playback of the video.
Lip Synch blurs the lines between voyeurism and participation by allowing the viewer to control the action in the video. This new media kissing booth also allows the user to experience some of the visceral actions of kissing as an individual; challenging the idea that it takes two people to kiss.
Materials used to create Lip Synch include an Arduino microcontroller, Processing 2.0a4, a Canon 5D + Zeiss lenses, Final Cut 7, and lollipops.
Lip Synch was created in collaboaration with Sarah Hallacher and Alessandra Villaamil.
For more information, please visit the Lip Synch website.
REMQuilt helps couples decipher the secret language of their sleep. Each night, it tracks their restlessness, closeness, and body contact; each morning, it weaves this data into a representation of their sleep, based on these factors plus time, that is projected on their bed in a quilt-like pattern.
REMQuilt is comprised of a number of digital textiles: a Kinect camera for low light camera and depth; face tracking libraries in openFrameworks to suggest restlessness and proximity; two conductive pillow cases and an Arduino to measure body contact between sleepers; a laptop computer and software to knit together all of these variables, and a projector mounted above the bed to illuminate the connections in the morning.
REMQuilt was built in collaboration with Justin Lange and Patrick Muth.
Similar to the children's game 'Telephone', we began with a videotaped reading of a story by Tess Lynch, then summarized the story, and then we showed it to ten participants, each one viewing the video from the previous person until the story both deteriorated and grew in some way. A project for Generative Systems, this project examines the use of repetition, mirroring, glide reflection, and translation in collective storytelling.
This project was a collaboration with Sarah Hallacher.
Tess' original story can be found here. She also liked our project here.
In our ever-connected world, we are constantly performing, even while seated behind our computer screens. With infinite lines of communication, signals are bound to cross, which can result in confusion, frustration, and sometimes beauty.
M1X3D 51GN4L5 is a 3-minute video piece created for the 120' x 10' video wall at Frank Gehry's IAC building in Manhattan.
M1X3D 51GN4L5 was created with Sarah Hallacher for Dan Shiffman's Big Screens class as part of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.
Special thanks to Winslow Porter and Ptom Bjork for music composition.
Table Setting was created as an installation concept for the Tenement Museum in Manhattan's Lower East Side Neighborhood.
The Tenement Museum's mission is to share the stories of the working-class immigrants who inhabited the building between the years of 1863 and the 1950s.
We found the dinne table to be a particularly compelling area of each restored apartment, and noticed that many of the tours we went on focused heavily on eating rituals of the families.
Table Setting, an interactive storytelling experience, allows the visitors of the Tenement Museum to play the parts of the family members at dinner. As they interact with the seats and utensils, audio and video is triggered, making the visitors passive participants in the dinnertime rituals.
This project was created with Danne Woo for Jared Schiffman's Spatial Media class, part of the Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Program at NYU.
Birdw@tcher plays with tensions that occur between city and wilderness settings. This new media interface whimsically transforms an iPhone into binoculars. Opening a “window” onto a mountainous 3-D space, users traverse the virtual and real worlds simultaneously. Through exploring, it is possible to spot hidden songbirds.
Birdw@tcher was created for Phoenix Perry's Embodied Play class as part of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.
This project was featured in ACM's Interactions' Blog.
City Palettes uses a networked camera pointed towards the streets of New York and abstracts the camera data into an 8-banded color palette, resulting in an ambient representation of the dynamic, chaotic sidewalk activity of New York City.
City Palettes was created for Todd Holoubek's Generative Systems class as part of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.
Freezefram.es is a website that allows users to capture their friends' reactions to a specific moment of a YouTube video.
First, users paste in the URL for a YouTube video and then select a time to snap a picture with their friends' webcams. Then, a unique URL is generated so they may share the video with friends and see their reactions. Users who receive the link watch the video on our site, and it snaps a picture of them at the time code specified by the original user. A gallery is generated for each unique link, allowing participants to see who else has watched the video and reacted at the specified frame.
We were able to User Test this site on the web, as well as at the ITP Winter Show.
The code used to make Freezefram.es can be found on Github.
Freezefram.es was built in collaboration with Matt Richardson and Kim Ash as a project for Clay Shirky's Designing Conversational Spaces course, part of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.
A whimsical stop-motion animation about the history of the evolution of flying fish. A Brief History of the Evolution of Flying Fish was built using paper, goache, scissors, sweat, tears, and Dragon Stop Motion.
Story by Amelia Hancock. This stop motion was built in collaboration with Johann Diedrick.
The Waiting Game is a Data Representation of voter waiting times, by state, during the US 2012 presidential election.
Using twitter's streaming API, tweets were collected containing the term "hours to vote" to find the average waiting time for each state where data was available. The framework of the US flag was chosen not only for it's power as a visual icon, but also for a metaphor of navigating freedom - in both our civil rights as voters, but also quite literally in our visualization.
An animation of George Washington navigates an abstracted flag in real time. In instances where voters cited spending 3 hours at the polls, the animation takes that long to run. The blue portion of our flag serves as an unconventional menu, where the user is able to select a state to visualize. After a state is selected, tweets from that state are displayed in that area. When George reaches the end of The Waiting Game, an unceremonious '+1' pops up on screen.
The Waiting Game was created with R and Processing 2.03b at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in collaboration with Alessandra Villaamil, Deqing Sun, and Luis Daniel. The code can be found on github.
In Art History in college, I heard a lot about artists having dreams that inspired their later creations. Well, in this case, I had a crazy dream that the HBO show Girls starred Squirrels instead of the crew that Lena Dunham put together.
Sarah, my frequent collaborator and constant source of inspiration, replied to my crazy text and suggested that I make a video. So I did.
It now has almost 115K views after being featured on Gothamist, Vulture, Buzzfeed,Jezebel, Huffington Post NY & Comedy, The Atlantic WIRE, TIME Newsfeed, Tosh.0′s blog,PAPERMAG, AMNY, Glamour and more. GIRLS and Slate and The Guardian Guide tweeted it, which, in Sarah's words, 'felt pretty cool'.
The most important part about all of this? We got rewarded for being goofballs.
A Saturday-Morning-Cartoon-Intro concept for a Victorian-era Superhero, Mr. Reach. The Adventures of Mr. Reach was built using hand-drawn illustrations, Photoshop, After Effects, and Final Cut Pro.
This animation was a collaboration with Ben Light.
Our Graduate Microenterprise Consulting class was split into teams and subsequently paired with an aspiring entrepreneur in the Chicago area. As a team, we worked to develop a comprehensive business plan for our client, who wished to open a Cajun restaurant in the Chicago area.
The plan included a pricing strategy, 10-year financials, consumer research, location scouting, a marketing/branding strategy, and investor relations prep and guidance. My individual contribution included a Marketing and Visual Positioning strategy that included branding and website development.
The Roux business plan was a collaboration with Monika Kudlacz, Sean Leahy, and Chris Minning.
In Loyola University's Graduate School of Business, I studied Integrated Marketing Communications, which covered a broad range of communications topics and strategies. Here are a few sample projects from my time there.
Social Media Strategy/Analysis
Organizational Development/Analysis
Emotional Intelligence at Western Union
Inside the Google Machine
Integrated Marketing Communications
Consumer Behavior Research
Baby Boomers as Information Shoppers
International Marketing Communications
