This is the BearBooth. 

Think of it as a photo booth built to surprise and delight.

It is simply a curious black box from the outside, but once the user places their face inside, the system is triggered and a world of singing, seemingly ad infinitum, mechanical bears delight. In attempt to capture that moment of surprise, a hidden camera snaps a photo. The user only is only able to see the photo afterwards, wherein they realize they have become part of the bear milieu. 

Created in partnership with Paula Ceballos, the BearBooth is a physical computing project that incorporates soft circuitry, serial communication between Arduino and a computer using Javascript. The bears are mounted on servo motors.

To see all the transformations thus far, please visit flickr.com/bearbooth

[Physical Computing, Javascript, Arduino, Fabrication]

Can an artificial emotional intelligence ever exist? How well will computers be able to appreciate and interpret human emotion?

“Discover, understand and revise language tones in text.”  This is the selling point for IBM’s Tone Analyzer Beta built off of Watson.

Inspired by the recent release of the Watson Tone Analyzer, Leslie Ruckman and I decided to see what would happen if we tried to analyze the deeper human emotions conveyed through poetry with these newly minted tools. We decided to go with a familiar poet whose work was prolific enough to be counted as a data set, and popular enough to be fully digitized. We landed on Emily Dickinson.

We decided to start with her top 5 most popular poems assuming that they contained some magic that resonates with a largest number of people.

We then ran the text of these poems through Tone Analysis to discover emotional metrics such as: emotional summary, language style summary, and social summary.

Full Epub HERE

[Python Text Analysis]

Klopstock Poetry is poetry generated using a combination of keywords extracted from stock photos using Google's Cloud Vision API and the programmatically shuffled poetry of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. 

[Computer Vision, Python Text Analysis]

Disembodied 360 is an experiment in creative 360 video and spatialized sound using the Spatial Workstation for Facebook.

Sounds are spatialized to the emerging limbs and excerpts of Walt Whitman's The Body Electric are interspersed with the sporadically appearing body that hovers above. 

To view online, with a mobile device, or a Samsung Gear Headset, click here.

[360 Audio/Video, Spatialized Sound, Gear VR]

Alongside Leslie Ruckman, I created a series of web and printed images for the 2016 Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) Spring Show. The ITP Show is a biannual event that showcases the work of its graduate students at New York University.

The concept is inspired by the recent popularity explosion of Virtual Reality and general technology fetishism, particularly in a tech-centered program, such as ITP. The following are the final images and mockups. 

Show Link

[Design, Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator]

Unsolicited Advice from a Purported Relative at a Distant Family Reunion is an interactive visual that personalizes relationship advice to users, from strangers.

The relationship advice is pulled in real-time from the top comments in the 24 most recent posts in the subreddit /r/relationships. 

If there are currently no comments, the purported relative "(just wags finger)".

Play with the Sketch.

[Javascript]

 

Underground markets are not only a fascinating anthropological study in and of themselves, but they comprise a serious subsect of the actual economy. According to Buehn et al., underground or “shadow” markets make up about 1/6 of the estimated world GDP. What is being sold and where is it being sold?

These illegal centers of commerce speak to many of humanity’s honest demands, however disturbing they may be. Their existence serves to highlight our ability to commodify almost anything in this world.

The Black Market Vending Machine is attempt to highlight the absurd and disturbing nature of commodification around the world. 

I chose to use Havocscope for my information as opposed to live underground market sites (like the Silk Road) 1) for ease of access to information and 2) it provided an interesting data set since it has specifically cited incidents in various countries. It became apparent, while sifting through the information, that comparing the prices of things in different countries contributed to the disturbing nature of the underground market.

Using javascript (p5.js) I created an interactive, vending machine interface. When the user scrolls over the typical item, a black market item takes its place. Once a user selects the item, a list of selling countries appears. Each country has a unique price. If the user chooses to buy an item in particular country, a link to the particular incident from which that item and price was referenced pops up. 

The items sold include, AK-47s, prostitutes, fake Harvard degrees, girls, methamphetamine, tiger parts, kidneys, and hired hitman.

[Javascript]