Interactives
Digital
I’ve made a wide variety of digital interactive experiences and experiments primarily on the web.
Reimagining Virtual Museums for the Museum of Natural History
For this project our team created a working prototype of virtual field trip experience for the American Museum of Natural History. We created a platform where students could log on to a Virtual Hall of Mammals and enter different diorama experiences. The platform itself is a spatial video and audio chat platform where students in the same room can see and hear each other depending on how close they are to each other. This enables organic spatial conversation and shared experiences. The code was based off of the YORB project. I conceived of the project and then coded the entire experience in three.js using this starting template.
Thermal Record
Thermal Record is an interactive sculpture used for tracking patterns over cycles of time. It uses node.js, p5.js, a raspbery-pi and thermal printer to create a looped repeating clock of presents passed.
Head to https://thermal-record.glitch.me/ and describe your present moment. When you do so, it will get added to the great running thermal record.
This is Boring
My first foray into web art was a project done for the 2017 Digital Fringe Festival called This is Boring. Illustrator Jenny Kessler and I teamed up to create a fake instagram feed. I built the piece in Three.js and learned a lot along the way. Grab a smartphone (will not work work on desktop) and head to http://thisisaboring.website/feed to try it out!
The Miscellaneous Space Odyssey
My next major digital project was for the 2018 Digital Fringe Festival. Illustrator Jenny Kessler and I teamed up again along with 14 writers who were each given a time period, a location and their choice of a key phrase. They then wrote a 4 panel comic, Jenny illustrated them and I combined them all together in Three.js. It was a pretty large project (it takes a minute to load!) but we were very happy with how it turned out. Head over here to check it out!
Instructions- click the panels to advance to the next frame, tap the arrows to travel through time.
r and j
r and j is a game recasting Romeo and Juliet as modern day teens. And how do teens send missives to each other these days? Through text messages! In this game 2 players create accounts online and then engage in anonymous text conversations over a span of three days. The game uses Node.js and Twilio to create a text forwarding system that allows players to text each other directly while protecting their actual identities. The game was designed by Jessica Crane, and I built it using Node.js, Twilio and Glitch. Feel free to grab a partner and play the demo (which does not take three days…) over here!
You can also take a peek at the code on glitch.
Physical
At the same time as I was exploring digital interactivity, I also started working with various microcontrollers and Internet of Things… things. I began combining technologies to make interactive experiences in physical spaces. The main vehicle I used to explore these new technologies was the Symposium of Spirits- an annual halloween party/immersive experience my partner and I would throw for our friends and families! Due to the fact that they were one night parties, we don’t have great documentation of the events themselves, but below are test videos of some of the gadgets I was particularly proud of.
NFC Tarot
For the Symposium of Spirits every guest received in the mail a character card, a set of objectives and a special Tarot card. During the party, guests could approach a special psychics table, play their card and learn a secret about their future! The cards had NFC stickers attached which were read by an arduino which in turn triggered custom mapped projections in MAX.
Sensors and Lights!
I also embedded a bunch of force sensitive resistors into a carpet and triggered lighting and sound effects depending on where people were standing in the room. The sensors were hooked up to an arduino which was communicating with Phillips hue bulbs through MAX.
Web-socket Ouija
Finally, I made a Ouija board that was controlled remotely by a smartphone. I embed a pico projector into a lamp and mapped the ghostly letters onto an actual Ouija board. The controller was made in p5.js and used Node.js to talk with MAX.
