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Letter from the Editor Washington Square News

Washington Square News

The intersection of art and technology is messy. When we look at projects that rely heavily on graphic design, computer programming and animation, we want to separate the merits of the work based on the creative and the technical.

More often than not, we choose to celebrate the creative — the idea woman, the director, the star of the show — because those ideas are more tangible. The technical, the nitty-gritty, is scary for us non-STEM students who scorn calculus and the mandatory scientific reasoning core requirement. It stands to reason, then, that the creatively technical and the technically creative tend to be overlooked (even by the Arts Desk itself, whose staff primarily includes liberal arts majors). But this notion, I’ve come to realize, is a grave mistake.

Our technical confusion has created a barrier of entry to exploring and appreciating the thriving community of creative engineers, technologists and multimedia artists at our own university, where there are four separate degree programs for interactive digital media arts, and a plethora of other concentrations in artistic technology — including a game design program that’s ranked second in the country.

It’s time to give the painters and the pianists a break. For this issue, we’re looking at video games, performance art and design, and hopefully breaking down the stereotype that technology and the arts mix like oil and water. By the end of this issue, I think you’ll agree they’re much more like butter and toast.

Speaking of compliments, I have a few of my own to give to

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my Washington Square News family and friends. I started thinking about this issue in May, and with the helpful (and, at times, stressful) guidance of Guru Ramanathan, former Arts Editor and current Under the Arch Managing Editor, I was able to get the whole thing rolling in time for publication. If that seems like a long time, it was. Like most of the projects on the following pages, the Arts Issue cannot be done alone or in one night. It’s a labor of love that brings together writers, photographers, copy editors, graphic designers, managing editors and a highly necessary support system.

I’d like to thank the entire Under the Arch team for being so eager to help with the issue. I owe a very special thanks to Arin Garland for being the very patient, very positive editor I didn’t know I needed. To Mansee Khurana, Anna (Fin) Muratova, Anna de la Rosa and Andrew Ankersen, you all are excellent writers and editors, and Guru is lucky to have you on his team.

For those of you who do not know, the Copy Team at WSN is staffed by the most meticulous, thorough human beings at NYU and I couldn’t have asked for a better group to go through the issue.

And to the managing staff, Sakshi Venkatraman, Sam Klein and Kate Lowe, thank you for being you and saving the day over Google Docs and Slack.

This issue, as it appears before you, wouldn’t be possible without the beautiful work of Sophia Di Iorio and Deborah Alalade, who worked tirelessly on the multimedia, layout and coloring of the spreads. Thank you for taking my vague instructions

(at first, I told them to use the lights from TRON as inspiration) and turning the issue into this gorgeous, muted-neon masterpiece. And a special thanks to Celia Tewey for capturing the very aesthetic portraits you’re about to see throughout the issue.

To all the artists and technologists that allowed my writers to snoop and poke and prod into their lives, thank you, thank you, thank you. Despite how modest you all are, you’ve done amazing work, and I’m so happy that you allowed WSN to share it with the rest of our community.

Julie Goldberg, Kaylee DeFreitas, Ethan Zack and Fareid El Gafy, what would I do without you? Thank you for being the best deputies I could ever ask for and for picking up the slack at the Arts Desk while I was off worrying about this issue. To our lovely staff writers, Megan Chew, Destine Manson, Madeline Lyskawa and Sima Doctoroff, you’ve done great work and the Arts Desk thanks you.

Last but not least, I couldn’t have done this without the support of my friends and family, who have shown me so much love and support along the way. You inspire me and I hope this issue will inspire you in turn.

As you’ve probably ascertained by now, the Arts Issue was no easy feat. It took a lot of hyperventilating, sweating and sleepless nights to bring this to your hands and screens. But, such is the case with all creative pursuits, especially the ones we’ve outlined for you in this issue. So get a cup of coffee, tea or vodka (you do you), and get cozy.

This issue was made for you; enjoy it.

Washington Square News

Table of Contents 4

Ashley Jane Lewis

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Carrie Sijia Wang

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CLAIRE FISHMAN Arts Editor

A New Champion in the Fight for Tech Equitability

The Rules, Regulations and Systems of Carrie Sijia Wang

Claire Kerney-Volpe

Ph.D. Student Redefines Accessibility in the Arts

10 Julián Cordero

A Purpose in Every Pixel

Washington Square News

Each spread features an in-depth look at the artists’ works as well as studio photography by CELIA TEWEY Under the Arch Exposures Editor

12 Louise Lessél

The Scandinavian Scholar Fighting for Planet Earth

14 Morgan Mueller

An Artist’s Sensibility With an Engineer’s Mind

START

THAT’S AMAZING

ASHLEY JANE LEWIS

A New Champion in the Fight for Tech Equitability

Ashley Jane Lewis has made great strides in the new media art world, and she doesn’t plan on slowing down anytime soon.

By KAYLEE DeFREITAS Deputy Arts Editor When asked about the one thing she wants people to take away from her work, Tisch graduate student Ashley Jane Lewis splits the question into two categories: art and education. Considering her influence in both fields, it is apparent why she was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Black Women to watch in 2016.

Lewis grew up in a small town in Ontario and did exceptionally well in school. She had a love for music and visual art, so when it came time to look at universities, she searched for a school that would allow her to combine these passions with tech as she moved to the next stage of her life. She found her desired path at Toronto’s Ryerson University in the New Media BFA program.

“I had never seen an art program as liberal as that, meaning that you could create art with code or art around music or art around robotics,” Lewis said.

Her decision to follow a less traditional route in the arts stemmed from a desire to be able to wear multiple hats rather than just focus on one set path. When she began school as an undergraduate, she didn’t know much about tech or coding But once she learned about the unexpected connection between her artistic side and the once mysterious language of code, she developed a newfound love

for media and technology. She also took influence from cultural movements around her, such as the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

One project she worked on in her undergrad years was a keyboard modification. Her project, however, wasn’t just a simple switch of the keys. She created a keyboard called The Obama Board that had the words of former President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech wired to each key. People could interact with the keyboard and create their own speeches with his voice. She gained critical acclaim for this project and was even featured on the White House’s website for a time.

Lewis said that her undergrad and graduate years have provided her with many mentors who have been pioneers in the tech art field, but the first people she always thinks of as inspirations are her parents. Both immigrants, one from England and one from Jamaica, she is grateful they were open to her choice of career and did not pressure her to go into a traditional field.

“I always credit my parents for being like, ‘I don’t know what new media art is, but if that’s what makes you happy, sure. I don’t know what ITP is, but if that’s what makes you happy, fine.’” Lewis said.

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in 2012, Lewis began to teach young people — more specif-

ically, young women and people of color — how to code with a Canadian company similar to Girls Who Code. She explained the decision as a response to the fact that the world is becoming increasingly technologized, limiting opportunities and aggravating the wealth gap.

Lewis believes code runs everything around us now, and recognizing this is a prerequisite to seeing how oppression takes form in the tech world.

When she broke into the tech industry after college, she began to see just how much of it is run by white men and how much power this limited group of people has to make crucial decisions for everyone else. Lewis mentioned how something as simple as stoplights are run by the same code and tech that massive media organizations like Facebook use for operations. When one group has the monopoly over these systems, a disproportionate concentration of power inevitably results. This imbalance is what drew Lewis to teach code.

“There is a lot of prime opportunity for forms of oppression to re-manifest themselves in algorithmic bias,” Lewis said. “To solve that, in my opinion, is to ensure that there are people at the table, people who work in those positions, holding identities of marginalization.”

One way she followed through with this intention is by teaching code to young people in Johannesburg.

Many of her students were first-time coders getting involved in the tech industry early thanks to Lewis’s support. The young girls in the program in particular saw Lewis, a woman in the industry, as a mentor and empowering role model.

The program holds deep significance for Lewis because she witnessed parents supporting their children, much like her own had done years before when she decided to take the deep dive into a tech-based career despite not being very aware of what that entailed.

“I just really loved the parents who had no idea about technology and were putting their daughters into this program because they believed in something,” Lewis said. “Or my favorite mothers who were putting their daughters into these programs, recognizing how valuable it was and then taking coding classes themselves to switch careers.”

Her nomination for Canada’s Top 100 Black Women to Watch came from one such mother who had been inspired by Lewis to take up coding and pursue a technology career. The submissions had closed by the time the mother had reached out to the organization but once she told them the story of how much Lewis had impacted her and her daughters’ life they put her up for nomination. Lewis may have thought she was just teaching coding, but to these young women and their parents, she was giving girls the confidence to pursue success in a field dominated by men.

Lewis is currently pursuing a graduate degree with the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and is on track to complete the program in 2020. She was drawn to the program because it offers her the opportunity to bring tech into play in multiple fields of artistic study, as she did at Ryerson. Another benefit, of course, is NYU’s urban location.

“Here there are so many people and so many galleries that it just sustains more opportunity for you to exhibit,” Lewis said. “I’ve been able to find little pockets of people who are operating in the same artistic field as I am.”

Lewis’ current project in development is a fascinating work of bio-art, a style of art that involves working with living specimens. The living organism that Lewis chose to work with

is multi-celled yellow slime mold, which one would usually find on forest floors.

Confusingly, the mold has been refernced as a way to understand and interpret Brexit. The way the mold interacts with itself and its environment is perceived as a direct mirror to Europe’s political climate. The mold is made of many different parts that exist on their own, but make decisions as a group in order to survive and, as a result, flourish. Due to this unique make-up, slime molds are considered to be a superorganism — an organism consisting of multiple organisms that function as a whole.

This organism piqued the interest of Lewis and her collaborator, who are now developing a mobile technology lab with the mold. They are analyzing the ways in which the multiple organisms in the yellow slime mold make decisions and interact evenly with all cells, and how this connects to diasporic communities. Another angle they are examining is the discrimination against people categorized as other by society.

“We also think that it has a lot of interesting properties around how you might navigate a world if you were an other or how you might navigate a world if borders were a large concern in your life, which is very topical at the moment,” Lewis said.

As the mold grows, it triggers sensors that play stories and videos while helping participants interact with New York through this bio-art technology.

Their main goal with the slime tech lab is to get people to think about how they treat people they perceive as other and the effect this has on societal norms. This project will soon be on display at Gen Space, a community bio-art lab, on Oct. 20 and 27.

Lewis has helped champion diversity in tech for young women of color and even inspired their parents in the process. As she looks to the future, she firmly keeps her mission in mind.

“I would hope that young people who are women and people of color would see the work that I am doing as a reflection of the fact that they could do it too,” Lewis said. “It doesn’t matter what the majority determines the field should look like. If that’s for you, then that’s for you.”

Email Kaylee DeFreitas at kdefreitas@nyunews.com.

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The Obama Board 2011

This interactive art piece consists of a keyboard where each key has one word attached to it. The words, clipped from sections of former President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, are taped to the top. The pressure of someone’s finger on a key triggers a signal that is transmitted through a media cable into a laptop.

Once the signal is obtained, the laptop goes through a code that converts the sound of the note into a word and feeds it through the speaker. The interactive experience was presented in the Toronto Mini Maker Faire, presented in the Detroit Maker Faire and was featured on the White House’s website. This piece allows users to strategically choose meaningful phrases, or randomly throw words together, depending on what they want President Obama to say. Ashley Jane Lewis, inspired by Obama’s 2008 campaign and the grandeur of his speeches, was interested in being able to give users the opportunity to use his words and see how they would make sentences that are important to them.

Courtesy of Ashley Jane Lewis

Phrases from former President Obama’s 2008 inauguration speech are taped on the keys of a piano. When the user hits them, the phrases are vocalized by President Obama.

A Portal Waits in Brooklyn 2018

Courtesy of Ashley Jane Lewis

Lewis uses P5.js programming to immerse the user in this interactive dystopian game, guiding them with audio and visuals through Brooklyn after the city mysteriously goes dark.

In this story, the city abruptly goes dark and the viewer becomes a player who must navigate their way through the metropolis-turned-ghosttown. After finding a mysterious USB drive along the way, the objective is to figure out the secrets it holds. To progress the story further, the player is advised to click on the screen to open a briefcase or virtually destroy the USB drive.

As you click from one chapter to the next, there is an audio commentary that complements the visuals. Audio files and notes that accompany the mystery story hold clues that help with figuring out why Brooklyn has mysteriously gone dark. To create this game Lewis used a component of the popular programming language javascript known as P5.js. P5.js is a javascript library that aims to make easy coding accessible to artists and nonprogrammers. Lewis uses P5.js to tell half of the story through a browser.

The other half of the mystery is told in print,

presented like prose. The printed component gives background information on the storyline while the digital part allows you to interact with the story as you move your way through the Brooklyn subway. In an attempt to create the tension needed to amplify the story, Lewis used both mediums while simultaneously experimenting with code in the form of storytelling. Lewis plans to expand on the project going forward as it is still only in its first draft.

View the full project here

->

Forest 2015

Composed of alluring moving lights and color that are continuously changing even when no one is physically moving the panels, visitors can walk through a mirage of twisting organic strands and sloshing light.

This installation makes one feel as if they are walking through a forest on their own. The illuminatined forest consists of thousands of LED lights and software created by internationally acclaimed artist Micah Elizabeth Scott. Scott worked with a number of students from Ryerson University’s New Media program in Toronto, including Lewis to bring this piece to life.

Lewis took on the lead role of managing the production and fabrication of Forest. Visitors are able to turn the round panels and evoke an array of hues that collectively produce a forest of vibrant colors. The spinning panels that the colors are projected on are composed of fibreboard that aids in the signaling of movement from stickers on the back of the panels. The piece encourages collaboration with others: with each viewer spinning their own panel, the lights gradually become one giant forest of lights sloshing around. The piece was commissioned by TIFF for the 2015 digiPlaySpace.

Courtesy of Ashley Jane Lewis

This luminescent display is created by thousands of LED lights and different colored panels that constantly change. Accompanied by twisting dotted lights that emulate a tree’s branches, it creates the illusion of walking through a forest.

Project Descriptions by

DESTINE MANSON Contributing Writer

5

CARRIE SIJIA WANG The Rules, Regulations and Systems of Carrie Sijia Wang switching from a student visa, to a work visa, then back to a student visa. She often had no idea why certain information was required or how it all worked.

The process, for Wang, was not unlike her experience of high school.

“It kind of feels like you’re going round

to get a job,” Wang said, laughing. “And I was pretty young and I didn’t know how to survive, so I thought I was not ready to do art as my main career. So I switched to graphic design.”

After graduating, she worked at a design agency in Chicago called UpShift for two years before moving to New York, where she worked at M Moser Associates, an architecture and interior design company.

“I’m interested in office culture and office politics,” Wang said. “I don’t actually play those politics but I like to observe them.”

She declares that she is “inspired by

“surreal world of tree-like structures, open water, and sounds from the past,” according to Wang’s website. Within this virtual reality, they are encouraged to verbalize their observations of their surroundings.

The undisclosed goal of the project is to inspire the two participants — who are unaware that they are in the same virtual reality as the other — within this landscape.

“When we talk about VR, the criticism has been that it kind of blocks you off from reality, communication with real people,” Wang said. “The thought was, what if we can create a VR project that brings peo-

and round in a big machine,” Wang said. “You never really think about why or, like, how does this all relate to me?

You just do it.”

And yet, it was in that potentially stultifying setting that her passion for the arts blossomed. With limited time and little resources, Wang was always anxious to create. She thinks her interest in the arts was even more persistent in that strict environment than it was in college.

She explained that she went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for an abrupt change in her life. Not only was she moving to a new country, but Wang was starting over in a big city, and what she describes as a particularly American city — at least compared to New York.

Wang arrived at SAIC intending to study photography and film, before ultimately switching her major to graphic design.

“After a year and a half I was like — well, my parents were like — you will not be able

bureaucracy” and the ways in which it changes one’s perspective on the world, and on themselves.

“New York inspired me to look at art again,” Wang said. “That’s why I went to ITP. I knew a few people who went to the program. I found I could do a little bit of everything […] so I thought it was perfect for me.”

Working alongside peers from such a diverse array of artistic backgrounds, from photography to performance to more techbased fields, Wang was able to discover new avenues through which she could express her ideas as well as gain technical skills that had previously seemed foreign or out of her wheelhouse.

Before ITP, she knew hardly anything about programming, and never imagined she would create her own VR project someday.

Wang’s interactive piece, titled “In Memoriam,” places its two participants in a

ple together? And they can explore this new world together while talking, verbally, with each other.”

The project came out of a class she took at ITP called Desert of the Real: Deep Dive into Social VR. While she’s not the most confident in her programming skills, she credits ITP for exposing her to other students who specialize in technical fields that she’s academically unfamiliar with.

It was at ITP that she learned how to speak the language of the technoverse.

She mentioned that a lot of technical terms, such as machine learning, virtual reality, augmented reality and blockchain are thrown around in the media but rarely fully explained.

“I still can’t say I completely understand blockchain,” she said.

One of her projects, “Museum of Plastic Age,” was inspired by a trip to The Met. She took notice of a group on a guided

The Chinese American artist discusses the absurdities of the modern world, how ITP expanded her horizons and why she’s inspired by bureaucracy.

By JULIE GOLDBERG Books & Theater Editor

“To become a content generator, a low-level government clerk at the Office of Content Generation involves a long and complex process. One important milestone in the process is the qualification test.” This is the introduction to Carrie Sijia Wang’s performance piece, “The System.”

In “The System,” Wang sits at a keyboard and types furiously in order to complete “The Content Generator Qualification Test.” The test loops between what Wang refers to as Content Generation, Integration Reinforcement and Subject Realignment.

Content Generation demands the subject to type as fast as possible, while Integration Reinforcement calls on them to dictate, aloud, slogans such as “Liberty is a fight to fight because we are all brothers.”

Subject Realignment is a reset. The sound of typing creates a modular music composition of monotone, staccato tapping.

Sitting across from me in a coffee shop on West Third Street, Wang herself is rather soft-spoken and reserved, though just as self-possessed as the subject of “The System.”

A recent alumna of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, Wang began work this fall as a resident researcher in the program.

“We spend half our time doing our own projects, research and whatever,” she said.

“The other half is devoted to various dayto-day activities, such as workshops for students, TA’ing for professors or helping organize events or shows.”

She’s grateful to have this time to develop her ideas and generate new work.

Through her multimedia projects, she meditates on expansive ideas such as consumerism, nationalism, mass surveillance and environmental issues.

“People have been talking, especially recently, about how different countries kind of close themselves off and globalism has kind of come to an end, stuff like that,” Wang said, describing the impetus for the creation of “The System.”

“What does a nation mean to individuals?” she asked. “Why do we have to sing national anthems? It’s kind of like people think it’s a given to love your country, but why?”

Her approach to investigating these questions was to compile lyrics from all 204 of the world’s national anthems as the source text for the Integration Reinforcement, as well as text from international tourism websites for the Content Generation portion.

“All of them were official websites, by the government, not just from an agency,” Wang said. “So that’s what the countries want to present to the world. The national anthem is more like what they want their citizens to be proud of.”

The project, for Wang, was not only about nations, but about the ways individuals operate within systems, adhering to a set of “invisible rules” that go unexamined.

She also said that much of her work is informed by her experiences in a strict boarding school in China, in the U.S. immigration system and in the modern office.

“I’m sensitive to rules, regulations and systems,” she said.

As an international student, she had to go through copious amounts of paperwork,

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tour through the museum, and began to listen in on the tour leader’s explanations of the meaning behind the various artifacts.

“I heard them saying things like ‘this is a symbol for their God, or this belief, or sex,’ and all of those kind of grand concepts,” Wang said. “When I looked closely, it was just, like, a cup or some container.

“If people in the future look back on our everyday life, would they be assuming that everything has a meaning? There are all these mundane things and when you put them on a pedestal, suddenly they are full of symbolism.”

“Museum of Plastic Age” is an interactive installation which exhibits items from the 21st century in an imagined museum from the future, featuring plastic cups from Starbucks and Cha Cha Matcha represented as potential ritual objects. The installation was first shown at the 2017 ITP Winter Show, and later exhibited at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Looking ahead, Wang is working on two projects, both inspired by a “futuristic work environment” in which individuals are constantly observed and evaluated by human resources AI. While she executed a version of this entitled “ALEX, Your Best Friend at Work” as her thesis project at ITP, she hopes that with her new project she can take what was a one-sided performance and translate it into a more interactive experience.

The first project is a browser-based storytelling project that engages the participant in an interview with an AI; during the interview, they are able to see the whole office environment in which they would be working.

“The other project is more of an onsite, participatory experience,” she said. It would be presented as a series of installations in which participants would be asked to perform certain tasks or activities.

She imagines one of these installations might be called “work is play.”

In a real-life simulated work environment, participants would be urged to play some innocuous games, all while being ranked against their coworkers by their human resources department.

In another scenario, HR might intervene in a conversation between two colleagues to suggest new topics.

It wouldn’t be the first time Wang examined the role of surveillance in our day-to-day lives.

In her performance piece “Color Censorship,” for example, Wang creates an Orwellian “Office of Stability and Happiness” dedicated to expunging any colors that pose a threat to the mental health of the population. The performer is put in the role of the “moderator” who must delete taboo colors from a screen, according to a series of changing and abstract rules, such as “saturation fosters immorality.”

In regard to the future, Wang is focused on continuing to create, but she’s also considering teaching.

“I realized I really enjoyed teaching when I was giving workshops and stuff,” she said. “I was always kind of opposed to it because my mom is a professor and I didn’t want to go in the same direction, but I’ve discovered that’s something I would do.”

Wang’s own work still remains her top priority.

“I want to just keep doing my own projects rather than going back to a design agency to do a 9-6 job,” she said.

Of course, the daily grind of an office job can always offer new inspiration.

Email Julie Goldberg at jgoldberg@nyunews.com.

Type to Erase.

Repeat to Forget.

2018

In the interactive installation “Type to Erase. Repeat to Forget,” Carrie Sijia Wang plays with juxtaposition by reversing everyday tasks. During the first part of the experience, “Type to Erase,” the user sits in front of a computer screen that has a sentence written across it in white. As you type out the words of the sentence on the keyboard, rather than generating new words, the sentence starts to disappear.

During the second part of the installation, “Repeat to Forget,” viewers are invited to stand in front of a microphone set up next to a

Courtesy of Carrie Sijia Wang

A viewer takes part in the second part of the installation, “Repeat to Forget,” where they say out loud the phrases they see on screen only to watch them disappear seconds later.

television screen. On the screen, there are phrases written in black lettering — taken from the same text used in part one — and as the phrases are correctly spoken into the microphone, they disappear from the screen.

Through the process of speaking and interacting with the speech recognition software that judges the viewer’s pronunciation, the meaning of some of the words are redefined until they become mere syllables. This installation was presented as part of NYU’s 2018 Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show.

The System 2018

In her performance of “The System,” Wang invites the audience to a futuristic world where they watch her as she tries to pass the fictional Content Generator Qualification Test. Wang sits on stage, dressed in a white sweatshirt and white gloves, going through the motions of the long and complicated test. It’s meant to determine her fate as a content generator, a low-level government clerk position at the Office of Content Generation.

The test involves three parts: content generation, integration reinforcement and subject realignment. Looping between each section, the test gets more intense with each new

cycle. During the first part, content generation, Wang is asked to type as fast as she can in a limited time. The text used for this step is sourced from a collection of destination descriptions on international tourism websites.

For the next step — integration reinforcement — Wang recites slogans made from a combination of lyrics from different national anthems, as lead by a computerized voice. The texts for both steps are Markov chain-generated, which is a similar method used in speech prediction and translation. At the end of each performance, Wang, candidate 3752, ultimately passes the test.

Courtesy of Carrie Sijia Wang

Wang, dressed in all white, speaks in front of an audience for “The System,” a performance piece in which she enacts a test to determine her fate in a futuristic world.

ALEX, Your Best Friend at Work 2019

Courtesy of Carrie Sijia Wang

Presenting ALEX, an artificial intelligence system that Wang interacts with in a live performance as if it were her therapist. ALEX records her emotions and translates them into data to analyze her emotions

During this participatory experience, Wang creates a futuristic world reminiscent of “1984,” in which an artificial intelligence system called ALEX knows everything about her. The performance follows a linear narrative.

At the beginning, Wang gets caught on camera crying in a stairwell at work.

Because crying is a behavior deemed “out of range,” Wang has to go see ALEX for a one-on-one session, which includes conversation, data collection, facial expression analysis and speech analysis.

For ALEX, everything is technical, and all of Wang’s emotions are rationalized and translated into data used to determine the root cause of Wang’s “out

of range” emotions. Wang’s character goes through the motions of the simulation with a straight face, void of expression. The only time her character shows “out of range” emotions is when she cries in the staircase.

After the performance, which presents this interaction between Wang and ALEX, the audience is invited to engage in the participatory experience.

Three at a time, audience members go into an office space, where ALEX 2.0 is loaded on three separate computers.

There, according to the description of Wang’s website, “the participants are asked to give up their free will and follow ALEX’s suggestions for 10 minutes.”

Project Descriptions by

MADELEINE LYSKAWA Contributing Writer

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CLAIRE KERNEY-VOLPE Ph.D. Student Redefines Accessibility in the Arts

Claire Kearney-Volpe is a user experience researcher who has worked with Google and the Processing Foundation to make creative content more accessible. The technology she has helped create has redefined what it means to be a visual thinker.

By ARIN GARLAND Under the Arch Editor Claire Kearney-Volpe is a problem-solver. She is also a technologist, a designer and an art therapist. With three — soon to be four — different degrees, it is only natural that she has many titles. But despite her major in visual art, she is not an artist.

Kearney-Volpe is a Ph.D. candidate in NYU’s Rehabilitation Sciences Program, expecting to graduate in 2020.

Her work revolves around making technology more accessible for those in the disabled community. But her path — from making oil paintings and abstract drawings to designing and developing accessible technology — was anything but linear.

She became involved with art the way most kids do — in preschool, drawing incomprehensible crayon doodles on colored construction paper and making muddy watercolor paintings. Both of her parents had an appreciation for art, especially her father, who studied child development at the Institute of Child Study, where children were given an artsheavy education.

Kearney-Volpe completed a double major in psychology and visual arts, with a concentration in painting and drawing, at the University of British Columbia in 2009. Despite her passion, she soon realized that professional painting was not in her future.

“I wasn’t really drawn to the art world, and I didn’t feel like I was good enough to be an artist,” Kearney-Volpe said. “But I wanted to keep art and creativity in my life.”

She puts it bluntly, but regardless of whether or not she was good enough, her decision to not go down a traditional art path allowed her to pursue something far more meaningful to her: helping others.

In 2011, Kearney-Volpe graduated from The Vancouver Art Therapy Institute with a degree in art therapy.

Given her background in art, Kearney-Volpe understands the importance of art as a form of self-expression. For her, creation has always been more about its therapeutic qualities than creating a flawless final product.

“You enter into a state of flow when you are making art,” Kearney-Volpe said. “It’s like this other form of communication and physical sort of process that can be cathartic […] you don’t have to express yourself mediated by words.”

While working as an art therapist, she assisted a middle school student on the autism spectrum who had trouble conversing with others, but made mu-

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sic and intricate designs with clay.

Through such interactions, she observed firsthand the way that art can foster growth and serve as a form of expression.

Around the same time, she worked as a research assistant at a hospital where she mapped the movement of the chronically homeless and related those data to their health and well-being. To do this, Kearney-Volpe used geographic information system programs to make maps that showed how many moves the patients were actually making.

“I got really into data visualizations from that work,” Kerney-Volpe said.

“So I watched a few TED Talks, and one of the TED Talks I saw was this guy, Jer Thorp, who was a faculty member at ITP.” She decided to get her master’s in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2013, and it was here she took a class called “Developing Assistive Technologies.” The class partnered with the NYU Ability Project, a Tandon-based interdisciplinary research program that aims to further the study of assistive and rehabilitative technology. The program uses a participatory design approach to all of its projects, meaning that the intended users of accessibility tools — designed with people with disabilities in mind — participate in their creation.

It was in this class that everything came together: her desire to help others, her fascination with technology and the artistic aspect of designing it. Following the class, she became a research fellow at the NYU Ability Project.

Through this program, Kearney-Volpe met Chancey Fleet, a blind technology expert who works at the New York Public Library as an assistive tech educator. She is also an affiliate of the Data & Society Research Institute and Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York.

“She’s wicked smart,” Kearney-Volpe said. “She really intimidates me. Chancey is the whole reason why I do accessibility work.”

Growing up blind, Fleet internalized the apparent, but unspoken message that she wasn’t capable of excelling at visual activities, such as drawing, mathematics and graphics. As a spatial thinker, this was detrimental to her learning and her confidence in her abilities.

“The implicit belief that blind people only need to work with plain text and that either they won’t understand graphics, or that those graphics are too difficult to deliver, is a really deep and pernicious dark pattern,” Fleet said.

Kearney-Volpe worked with Fleet to amend these “dark patterns.” First, they collaborated on a diagramming tool for Fleet, who had the responsibility of helping plan a banquet for the New York Public Library’s annual Accessible Community, Culture and Technology Fair.

However, while planning, Kearney-Volpe ran into an obstacle: in order for Fleet to effectively participate in the design process, she needed to learn to code. But despite copious amounts of searching, the pair could not find a comprehensive coding guide that was accessible to Fleet’s screen reader, leading Kearney-Volpe to an alarming realization.

“I realized how little I knew about digital accessibility — and I was about to graduate from a master’s program in interactive telecommunications,” Kearney-Volpe said. “There was just no mention up until that point about digital accessibility, which is terrifying.”

Despite being in her last year of a technology-centered masters program, her lack of knowledge on web accessibility left her dismayed. But with her frustration came the determination to find a solution.

So Kearney-Volpe and Fleet applied and were accepted for the Processing Foundation’s 2016 fellowship. They conducted several interviews with experts in the field of Human Computer Interaction who all had visual impairments. They also held various workshops to test their redesigned P5.js web-editor and the effectiveness of their learning resources, implementing the same participatory design practices that Kearney-Volpe absorbed from the Ability Project.

As a result, P5.js, also known as processing — a programming language used for coding “in the context of the visual arts”— is now accessible to screen readers, allowing blind and visually impaired people to code, create and enjoy it non-visually.

Fleet explained that many design and technology students come to the New York Public Library with assign-

ments from their professors, attempting to finish their projects as quickly as possible and rarely seeing them as meaning anything more than an assignment within the library’s walls. In contrast, Kearney-Volpe’s dedication is a rarity, a quality that Fleet has appreciated since their first meeting.

“Once in a blue moon, I would say one student in 10 or 15 turns out to be someone who just makes a stellar contribution to our learning community and to the community of practice for non-visual techniques,” Fleet said. “Claire is another one of these individuals.”

For Kearney-Volpe, Fleet is not only a sharp-witted collaborator and friend, but also a source of inspiration. Working with Fleet made her realize that art — the discipline she had so much love for as a child — did not come as easily for others as it did for her, not because they were incapable, but because they lacked the means.

After she graduated from the Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2015, Kearney-Volpe continued to work with Fleet on various projects, including processing. She started as a fellow for Google’s Creatability collective — an open source database of projects created by allies and researchers from the accessibility community in an initiative to make creative tools more accessible.

Fleet then came to her with another idea.

“Non-visual drawing is something that we [blind people] pine for, and are capable of and want,” Fleet said.

What if there was a tool that allowed just that?

In collaboration with Fleet, accessibility allies and members of Google’s creative team, Kearney-Volpe created a virtual tool called Sound Canvas.

Equipped with a sonified canvas that allows blind or visually impaired individuals to draw by making different sounds as they sketch, Sound Canvas uses keyboard commands while receiving real-time audio feedback depending on the location of the user’s cursor. For example, as you move

their arrow keys from left to right, a sound pans, and as you move up and down, the pitch changes.

Keyboard commands are not the only input. On the body tracking setting, movements are precisely recorded by a webcam and translated into brush strokes of black ink onto a computerized white canvas.

“I think a lot of people don’t realize it, [but] people that are blind or have low vision are all also spatial thinkers,” Kearney-Volpe said. “[They] have ideas and things that they want to communicate spatially and visually, and consume content that’s both spatial and visual.”

Public perception suggests that ocular vision and spatial information are somehow inseparable. As a result, there is a lack of adequate accessible technology, stifling the creative capability of spatially minded individuals within the disabled community.

“Our tools are inferior to our capacities,” as Fleet put it.

For her, Kearney-Volpe’s work is nothing short of a necessity.

Technology has the capacity to extend human abilities and open up new spaces, not only for coding and tech, but artistic expression, too.

However, it can also lock groups out of these spaces.

It is this lack of accessibility awareness that Kearney-Volpe hopes to highlight through research like her dissertation, which she is currently writing, centered on how to make technology and code more accessible to the blind or visually impaired.

From working as an art therapist to collaborating with Fleet, she has also seen firsthand the freedom that art gives everyone to express themselves, and the conduit technology can become, if used correctly.

“It’s not a big deal to actually make things more functional,” Kearney-Volpe said. “It just takes a bit of extra thought.”

Email Arin Garland at agarland@nyunews.com.

Accessibility in Coding 2019

Claire Kearney-Volpe has teamed up with Chancey Fleet — a blind technology expert — and the Processing Foundation to modify P5 coding and improve its accessibility for visually impaired and blind individuals. While Kearny-Volpe and Fleet are keen to point out that there have been blind people who have built successful careers in coding, there are very few tools available to help them learn. Most people in the blind community use screen readers or devices that turn on-screen information into braille. However, because a lot of both coding and coding instructions are highly visual, the pair is focusing on ways to get that information across using non-visual means. A big part of their research and development is meeting and workshopping with members of the blind community, or as they call them, “expert stakeholders.”

Courtesy of The Processing Foundation

Claire Kearney-Volpe watches over three participants in her web development workshop for the visually impaired. In this study, she monitors the use of screenreaders to create P5.js sketches.

Sound Canvas 2018

Sound Canvas, made in partnership with Google Creative Lab, is a drawing tool with a twist. As you move the cursor around the screen, it produces a tone that changes the pitch as you go higher or lower on the screen, while side to side movement changes where the sound seems to emanate from, producing a Doppler-like effect. While you probably couldn’t paint the next Mona Lisa on it, or be the next Vivaldi, it is surprisingly addictive.

Its real potential, though, is bringing accessibility. With the requisite technology, the program can track a body part — like a finger or nose — and users can draw with that. So even people who are unable to use a keyboard or mouse are able to make some musical doodles.

Courtesy of Claire Kerney-Volpe

Sound Canvas allows blind or visually impaired users to draw images by emitting sound as their mouse moves along a computerized canvas. Images can be drawn with either keyboard commands or body movements tracked by a computer webcam.

NYU Ability Project 2013

Kearney-Volpe and a team of undergrads collaborated with The NYU Ability Project, which has partnered up with the New York City government and several private companies to come up with accessible tech, teaching methods and programs focused on the disabled community. Some projects include collaborating with Lavelle School for the Blind on accessible music-making methods. With the Cooper Hewitt Museum, they improved the accessibility of both the museum itself and its website. They have also worked with both AT&T and Spectrum on accessible tech interfaces.

Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt

Kearney-Volpe co-taught a class at the Cooper Hewitt Museum which brought together students and members of the disabled community to help design ways to make their exhibitions more accessible.

Project Descriptions by

ANDREW ANKERSEN Under the Arch Voices Editor

9

JULIÁN CORDERO A Purpose in Every Pixel

One Tisch alumnus infuses his video games with autobiographical meaning and meticulous artistry.

By ETHAN ZACK Music Editor Tisch ‘19 graduate Julián Cordero doesn’t own a single modern video game console. He doesn’t like to play games for more than a short period of time. He rarely interacts with big-budget releases. Yet the anti-gamer not only majored in Game Design, but has created several video games himself. His passion for the medium roots itself far from the traditional likes of “Super Mario Bros.” or “Call of Duty”; the designer has instead embraced the more abstract side of gaming.

When asked whether video games could be considered art, Cordero laughed.

“Yeah, of course,” he said.

“That’s a big debate online for whether they’re art, but for me, it was never really a question. Anything can be art.”

At four years old, when he still lived in Ecuador, Cordero was already interacting with video games. One of his first memories was watching his dad play “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” on his Nintendo 64.

“When I was a kid, I thought I was playing it,” Cordero said. “Of course, I wasn’t because I didn’t have a controller, but it was still a fun experience.”

As he grew up, he became more passionate about the medium.

Cordero’s interest in mainstream gaming peaked with the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3.

When Cordero moved to New York for college, he also moved away from the mainstream gaming scene. There are many indie developers and studios in the city, which Cordero attributed to the lack of many major publishers and companies based in the area. The fledgling game designer developed a deep appreciation for experimental, small-scale games like “Proteus” and “Orchards to Dust,” which traded traditional gameplay mechanics for an emphasis on story and atmosphere.

His interest in storytelling initially attracted him to the undergraduate Film & TV program at NYU, but he eventually settled on Game Design instead due to the freshness of a curriculum based on a burgeoning artistic industry.

“Teaching game design is so new that [the faculty] had no idea how to teach it, so it was a lot of experimentation,” Cordero said.

The designer’s latest project, which has been publicly available for just over a year, is a game called “Levedad.” The game is just as much an artistic venture for Cordero as it is a tool for players to create their own art. Available for free on Mac and PC, “Levedad” sets players in a digital world that rapidly speeds through time.

The user can take pictures of the environment, which result in abstract, long-exposure

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photographs that they can share with other users.

“I didn’t really want to game-ify it, in the sense that you had to take a picture of something,” Cordero said. “It was more about using the player’s expression so they can frame their own stuff. That’s the whole point. It doesn’t have to be a larger thing.”

“Levedad” originated as an autobiographical class assignment during Cordero’s senior year and, as such, is largely based on his own life.

“I was just looking back through old pictures of mine that I had taken and I found that there was a time period where I only took long-exposure pictures,” Cordero said. “I was trying to figure out why I liked taking those pictures so much.”

The game features many artistic touches based on Cordero’s heritage.

“It was more of a way to build it out as a real place based on real memories, and most of those are in Spanish for me,” Cordero said. “[But] I also realized that it didn’t matter if [the memories] were in Spanish ultimately. You don’t need to understand those words to understand the sentiment.”

Cordero said that the concept of small changes that build up over time is extremely important to him and is often reflected thematically and mechanically in his games.

“The house I grew up in, it was near a river, and at night, when I was going to bed, you could sort of hear the river,” Cordero said.

“Then there was a lot more development all around and eventually a highway was built. Now, when I sleep in my parent’s house, you can only hear the highway and the river is gone.”

We can see this industrialization in “Levedad” in the stars in the night sky. As the game progresses and more buildings start to crop up, the stars become dimmer and dimmer until they’re hardly even there at all.

“When I put that [mechanic] in, I thought nobody would notice but actually, a lot of people noticed,” Cordero said. “A lot of people relate to that small feeling of changes over time.”

Cordero believes in a dualistic nature of art — that it has different relationships to the producer and the consumer. For the long-exposure pictures in “Levedad,” the final image is available for all to see if the creator adds it to the public archive, but only the person who created the picture has an idea of the build-up and construction of the photo.

“The end result, you can put it out for everyone to see, but only you can see the build-up of that,” Cordero said. “I don’t think that whoever is consuming the art has to necessarily understand the whole process. It’s also just cool to see the final thing and have your own interpretations.”

The same relationship is ev-

ident in Cordero’s interactions with “Levedad” compared to that of the players. He cannot view his own creation in the same context that players can from an outside perspective.

“I can’t separate them from this one big thing that I created,” Cordero said. “I hope people can see the pictures as things that can stand out for themselves, but for me, as the person who built out the entire world, it’s impossible to detach that.”

The designer said he values video games as an artistic medium because of how experimental they can be in terms of format.

“Films have a very standardized format,” Cordero said. “About two hours and you go see it in the theater or on Netflix. The range of games being made in general is completely different, from games you can play on your phone to huge [big-budget] games.”

Cordero is skeptical of the strict categorization of art. The designer said defining a work of art by its genre or its medium oversimplifies how complex the content can be. Cordero gave the hypo-

thetical example of a hybrid project with elements of both films and video games.

Currently working as a teaching assistant in the Game Design department, Cordero dreams of making video games for a living. At the same time, he doesn’t support how commercialized the industry has become. In the age of digital microtransactions and in-app purchase in games, it seems to the designer like the focus is less on the art and more on the profits.

“Sometimes art doesn’t make money, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable,” Cordero said.

Cordero also criticized what he views as a general sense of entitlement around the video game consumer base, something referred to as “gamer culture.”

“I hate whenever these big companies say they’re putting the gamers first,” Cordero said. “If a game didn’t have a mechanic you like [...] you can say you didn’t like it. But the developers don’t owe anything to you; it reduces the amount of creative and artistic freedom.”

For now, Cordero is content

marching to the beat of his own drum. His next major project, “Despelote,” revolves around soccer, a sport that Cordero has had a fondness for since his childhood.

He wanted to emphasize how soccer has a universal understanding, unconstrained by cultural or language barriers.

The game once again returns to Cordero’s trademark theme of change over time, as the character ages throughout different segments of the game. Cordero said that the game addresses issues like misogyny and classism in soccer, as opposed to being a traditional sports game like the “FIFA” series.

Cordero explained that the game will likely take at least another year to be finished and released, and he is enthusiastic to continue pushing the boundaries of his own capability.

“I’m definitely limited to doing the stuff that I’m technically capable of, but at the same time, those limitations make me be more creative with how to solve them.”

Email Ethan Zack at ezack@nyunews.com.

Levedad 2018

“Levedad” is a self-described “game about capturing time through the contemplative gaze of longexposure photography.” Players start in a dark landscape, given nothing but basic controls to move around and a camera with which to take pictures of what they see. The player is able to control the shutter speed of the camera, allowing for different exposure lengths.

The game is dark-toned — not to be played in a well-lit room — and the longer you make the shutter, the more prominent small bits of light in the frame become. For example, the player may take a photograph of the starry

sky and watch the stars change from dots to streaks of light. The ethereal background music of the game makes “Levedad” calming to play. The graphics are somewhat Minecraftesque: blocky and simplified.

While the game is not available in a multiplayer format, there are characters that you can observe and take pictures of, so it’s not exactly a lonely game, although it is somewhat voyeuristic. The player can peer into someone’s room through a skylight and watch them go about their day as the player takes pictures of them.

Players can upload the photos they take to a public archive.

Courtesy of Julián Cordero

These colorful blocks are actually objects, distorted by the slow shutter of a player’s camera in “Levedad.” Players are equipped with a camera with an adjustable shutter speed and are able to explore their virtual surroundings through long exposure photography.

Despelote Coming Soon

“Despelote” is not yet fully developed or publicly available.

However, there is a teaser of the game available online. The game is much more action-oriented than “Levedad,” allowing the player to participate in a soccer game. However, it is not as simple as it sounds. Players may find themselves clashing with the other characters in the game, though the consequences are not yet clear since the game is still in development.

In a tweet, Cordero states that “Despelote” is “a game about the social context of futbol.”

The graphics of the game are very different from the simple features of

“Levedad.” The soccer game appears to be set in a park within a city, with tall buildings in the background. The game looks as if it has been handsketched with a pencil. The visuals are grainy and there is little to no color, but nevertheless, it is aesthetically pleasing. The background track of the trailer — and perhaps of the game — is quiet and slow Spanish music, which eventually becomes louder and faster, mirroring the events of the game itself. The human forms in the game are all dark-haired and dressed in white, making them pop against the background of buildings and grass.

Courtesy of Julián Cordero

Characters and important in Cordero’s unreleased game, “Despelote.” All have a simplified, hand-drawn appearance, such as the two characters pictured above, listening to the stereo. The hands at the bottom of the image belong to the player.

Bardo José 2019

Courtesy of Julián Cordero

In this game, players can experience scenic visuals, like this dark blue sky lit with bright electric streaks, accompanied by music which directly interacts with the scenes. The music is by an Ecuadorian band “Bardo José,” who the game is named after.

“Bardo José” is less of a game and more of an interactive visual experience. The game is set to different songs by Ecuadorian band Bardo José. When players first begin the game, they are placed atop a mountain in a colorful natural landscape of angular yellow and orange grass, complemented by a dark blue sky. Like in “Despelote,” the background features tall buildings, although these buildings are not shaped like New York City skyscrapers and are far more distant from where the player finds themself. The graphics are more similar to those in “Levedad,” with blocky, abstract forms.

However, the music is the real star here. There are several songs to choose from, including the most popular ones off the band’s new album, “Gato” and “Agua.” The song can be changed by pressing the right and left arrows on the keyboard. The grass moves to the rhythm of the somewhat electronic Ecuadorian music. Lines and swirls in the sky, reminiscent of the longexposure photography in “Levedad,” also accompany the music. Players may move around and obtain an aerial view by clicking their mouse, though the most hypnotic visual is the ever-changing sky and the waving vegetation.

Project Descriptions by

SIMA DOCTOROFF Staff Writer

11

LOUISE LESSÉL

The Scandinavian Scholar Fighting for Planet Earth

From music festivals to museums to J-PopCon, Louise Lessél uses her creative technology expertise and numerous media degrees to create art and experiences. Now, as a master’s student at NYU, she reflects on her educational career and her aspirations to spread awareness of overlooked issues.

By CLAIRE FISHMAN Arts Editor Louise Lessél looks like she wandered off the page of a Scandinavian lifestyle magazine. Freckled and fair, she meets me in clean, white clothes. As we shake hands, I mention that I haven’t met many Danes at NYU. She reminds me that higher education is free in Denmark; there isn’t much of a reason to go abroad. So why, I wonder, did she decide to come here to get her master’s in Interactive Telecommunications Design? Surely there were plenty of free programs available to her in Denmark.

As it turns out, there are. In fact, before coming to Tisch, she obtained two undergraduate degrees at Aalborg University — the fourth-best school in the world for engineering.

“Yep … I’m a huge geek,” Lessél said cheerfully.

For her first degree, Lessél studied interaction design — a practice that aims to make interactive technologies with an emphasis on how users will interact with them — with a concentration in user research.

Her formal degree, however, is the broader Digital Media and Design.

Her final project aimed to transform ebooks into interactive reading experiences through eye tracking and attention theory, which no doubt foreshadowed her interest in educa-

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tional technology.

While her Bachelors degree in Digital Media and Design would prove to be a great foundation for her work later on, it wasn’t great for the Danish job market at the time.

“When I was done in 2012, no one in Denmark had heard of interaction design — it was a brand new program,” Lessél said.

Since Lessél couldn’t get hired in her desired field, she turned to cultural marketing, which included marketing of concerts and festivals.

The shift to entertainment only made her want to pursue technology more.

While Lessél was working in the entertainment industry, she realized that she wanted to make the visuals and installations that made the events so special, as opposed to just marketing them. Through interactive technology, she posited that she could design things that engage with users in a spatialized way. And while Lessél was no expert in interactive technology, she did have a degree in interaction design under her belt, which gave her the confidence she needed to explore her new interest.

After further research, Lessél found out about an approachable and interesting subfield of interactive technology: museum installations. The field combined Lessél’s interest in user research and experience design and was particularly

relevant in Denmark. Like most Nordic countries, Danish history has a lot to do with Vikings, who’ve left few artifacts to be researched in modern museums. What has lasted through the years is often unimpressive to look at: things like large boulders, stone burial grounds and natural fortresses. Because of this, it’s often difficult to excite museum visitors with Viking artifacts, despite the large role they played in Scandinavian history. That’s one of the problems that Lessél sought to address.

“In Denmark we have a lot of old stones and [think] like, ‘Wow, how interesting, a stone,’” Lessél said. “I get that someone used this to capture their food or whatever in the Stone Age, but if I can’t picture it, then there’s a lot that can be done in that case to augment it — augmented reality, projections, visiting the field where it was dug up.”

With this new passion in mind, Lessél decided to return to Aalborg University in 2015 to study Medialogy, a program that combines media and technology. While she was there, she took a class where she had to learn Processing (p5.js), a code used in almost every piece of interactive technology. In an attempt to familiarize herself with p5.js, Lessél took to YouTube. There she found the guru of processing, ITP and alumni professor Daniel Shiffman. While Lessél didn’t know right then and there that she was bound to attend ITP and actually meet the Youtube star, Shiffman’s videos marked the start of her planning.

“It was three years in preparation to come [to ITP],” Lessél said.

Even with her two degrees, Tisch still offered Lessél something that most creative technologists only dream of: art school. Creative technologists aren’t barred from entering traditional art programs, but few programs offer the same mixture of art and technology as ITP. After all, most art students aren’t going to college to learn how to code. While in Denmark, this proved to be a dilemma for Lessél, who insists art school is a necessary first step for becoming recognized as an artist.

“If you say you are something and you don’t have another person validate it, it’s almost as if the state should have validated it; you should have gone to art school,” Lessél said.

“If you’re doing art and you didn’t go to art school it’s like, are you really an artist? What’s your day job?”

Lessél has a unique catalogue of odd jobs under her belt. In 2016, she was an experience designer at J-PopCon in Copenhagen where she transformed the event space into a Pokémon universe for 4,000 people. Her coworkers even got her to cosplay as Misty for the event. As an avid anime watcher and semi-fluent Japanese speaker, Lessél is es-

pecially proud of this opportunity.

Then, before she left for NYU, Lessél also got the opportunity to work with a design collective called Vertigo on The Wave, an interactive light installation that was shown at the 2018 Frost Festival in Copenhagen. Since coming to New York — perhaps due to the culture shift, perhaps due to the art school mentality — Lessél’s projects have become much more personal.

“What they’re asking at Tisch is very much, ‘What do you want to build? Who are you, what do you want to say? What’s the meaning of this?’” Lessél said. “I’ve been working on pieces that are more about environmental disaster because that’s something that matters to me.”

One such project is Cosmic Harp, a harp that uses lasers instead of strings and adjusts its sound based on the amount of space trash — outof-use satellites that are still orbiting Earth — above it. She groups the project into a subset of interactive technology meant to spread awareness of a phenomenon to its viewer, fittingly called awareness technology. For Lessél, who has always been passionate about climate change and pollution, tackling the little-known issue of space trash was the perfect subject for the project.

Lessél did not do the entire project by herself, as she emphasized to me multiple times throughout the interview. She said she was grateful for the help and collaborations with her classmates that made the project possible.

“Like all things in our world, nobody does it by themselves,” Lessél said.

Lessél estimated that Cosmic Harp took about two months to make from start to finish. She worked on the experience design for J-PopCon, an annual festival, for nearly a year. Although we may only experience interactive technologies

for a few minutes or hours, the time put into building the experience is often exponentially longer.

As a Fulbright Scholar, Lessél will have to return back to Denmark for two years after her student visa expires in order to share the skills she’s learned here. And while she’s looking forward to speaking Danish again, being an artist in Denmark is different from being an artist in New York.

“It’s been very healthy for me [to be in New York],” Lessél said. “In Denmark we have something called Janteloven, the law of Jante. It’s this concept that you should not believe you’re better than others. It’s a very all encroaching thing in the culture.

So coming here, it’s been very inspiring to be with people who actually see themselves as artists.”

Although New Yorkers are generally depicted as being cynical and rude, Lessél says her experience suggests otherwise. The people she’s met here have been nothing less than encouraging and accepting of her artistic ambitions.

For Lessél, art and technology have a symbiotic relationship; without each other they cannot survive.

Without the proper interactive technology, an ancient burial ground is just a cluster of stones in a field; a concert is just a bunch of people crowded around an acoustic guitar.

“A big thing for me is that I’ve moved myself physically to be somewhere,” Lessél said. “And in doing so, you’re automatically more validated because people [say] ‘Oh, you went a long way to get here,’ and then you also feel different about yourself because you went to all this trouble to do this thing and so you can’t just go back. Now you’re here; now you have to make something of it.”

Email Claire Fishman at cfishman@nyunews.com.

The Cosmic Harp 2019

“The Cosmic Harp” aims to bring greater visibility to the undetectable aspects of pollution via a harp with strings that are visible only when smoke or hands pass through them. The harp’s “strings,” which are actually lasers, serve as a metaphor for the manmade trash in space. Currently, 12,297 of the 19,685 satellites in Earth’s orbit are considered space debris, a fact that the piece attempts to highlight through its newest addition: sound.

Every 15 seconds, the sound

is updated based on a satellite position dataset. The sound distorts based on the ratio of active satellites to inactive satellites that are considered debris. The shape of the harp itself is based off the Armillary sphere, which was used in the 16th century to track celestial bodies. With its smoke detection and sound design components, “The Cosmic Harp” tracks something in space that doesn’t belong there — the floating pieces of trash that drift beside the ancient celestial bodies.

Courtesy of Louise Lessél

Louise Lessél’s “The Cosmic Harp” represents the invisible space debris which is polluting Earth’s orbit. The harp’s strings become visible if interacting with smoke or hands.

The Black Queen 2018

Courtesy of Louise Lessél

Louise Lessél’s “The Black Queen” serves as the embodiment of the evil myths surrounding queen Barbora. It’s a digital and computer-operated actor capable of interacting with an actress, who plays queen Barbora in her battle for her reputation and honor. The darkness is represented by particles following the actress and glass screens serve as triggers for various events to move the play along.

Despite what it sounds like, “The Black Queen” isn’t a physical being.

It’s a program brought to life by a team of artists. “The Black Queen’s” purpose is to assist with live theater performances as a computeroperated actor engaging with reallife actors.

According to its website, “the medieval queen Barbora of Celje was a powerful and intelligent ruler, whose life was rewritten as an evil myth.” Within the simulation, Barbora has to face the darkness and get her life back, as explained in the video presentation of the project.

Black dots, splatter and particles

on the floor follow the human actors around the stage, programmed to react to the decisions and movements.

Trigger-points resembling windows with frost patterns on them move the play along, alter the plot and prompt certain events. This provides the real-life actors with full control over the timing of their performance. The actors can cause the particles to move by, for example, pantomiming and “pushing” them with their hands.

The project traveled from Miami, where it premiered at the Prometeo Theater in September 2019, to Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Wave 2018

Initially created by Vertigo, a Danish company, “The Wave” was further developed

by Lessél for its return to Ofelia Beach during the Copenhagen Light Festival.

According to Vertigo’s website, they produce “digital experiences and audiovisual space transformations through interactive video scenography, laser visuals and custom LED light installations.”

The Wave is made up of 40 triangular gates big enough for visitors to walk through. All of the gates have a color, glow-

style and sound assigned to them, which are triggered by the participants passing through. Once the sensors at the foot of each gate are activated, the audio-visual experience begins.

“The Wave” puts participants in the center of its immersive experience. It incorporates three separate modes, known as landscapes: the futuristic, the retro white noise and the meditation, each meant to evoke different emotional responses from the audience.

Courtesy of Louise Lessél

Louise Lessél’s “The Wave,” created in collaboration with Danish collective Vertigo, presents users with a walk through experience, turning the audience into a part of the installation.

Project Descriptions by

MANSEE KHURANA Under the Arch Editor ANNA (FIN) MURATOVA Under the Arch Senior Reporter

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MORGAN MUELLER

An Artist’s Sensibility With an Engineer’s Mind

Morgan Mueller, a graduate student at Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, approaches the arts world with the calculating demeanor of an engineer

By FAREID EL GAFY Film & TV Editor “I love being the stupidest person in the room.”

25-year-old Morgan Mueller, a second-year graduate student at Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, is proud of everything he has yet to learn.

With the pragmatism of an engineer, Mueller tells me he’s only been an artist for a year. Whereas many young creatives are certain of their own pre-eminence, Mueller earnestly absorbs all that his peers have to offer. His persona as an artist is defined by his background in engineering, a dedication to community enrichment and the journey that brought him to the mecca of creatives he found at NYU only one year ago.

From his hometown of Reno, Nevada, Mueller found his way to the Birkenstock capital of the world, attending the University of Portland for college. Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Mueller says four years were too many in a city he feels was devoid of an arts scene.

Fresh out of college and seeking to get as far from the Beaver State as possible, Mueller travelled to northern Ghana under the employ of Saha Global, an NGO that provides infrastructure and opportunities to rural communities in the West African nation.

Founded by women, Saha is keen on empowerment.

“Women keep the communities running, so lifting them up lifts everyone up,” Mueller said.

Locals often have to drive for miles to a charging station to charge their phones or motorbikes. To alleviate this, Mueller and his coworkers constructed self-sustaining, solar-powered charging stations that locals, men and women alike, now run as small businesses, ensuring their upkeep.

After a few months in Ghana, Mueller returned to the United States. Given the opportunity to work an engineering job in New Jersey, he packed his things and drove from sea to shining sea.

He’s been living in New York for three and a half years.

In many ways, the city forged Mueller into the self-defined technologist and new media artist that he is today. New York has drawn in and developed many an artist, and Mueller is no exception, having been heavily influenced by the city’s architecture and pulsing energy.

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His first of three jobs was at a firm in New Jersey working on radio frequency engineering.

“I kind of hated it,” Mueller said.

With an electrical engineering degree and a year of work experience under his belt, Mueller started to suspect that he didn’t want to be an engineer for the rest of his life.

Mueller spent many of his early days in New York wandering the neighborhoods. He took up photography for the first time in the interest of capturing all he saw.

Inspired by the street art on every corner and the exhibitions in every borough, he resolved to try his hand at architecture and landed a job at Daniel Frisch Architecture by leveraging his experience in engineering.

While at the firm, Mueller mostly worked in software development and marketing, but he was also exposed to other aspects of the office’s work. Enthralled by the union of form and function that architecture afforded, Mueller briefly envisioned a future at architectural school. He persisted in his work, and: “Then I realized I hated working in architecture,” Mueller said.

The 9-to-5 grind and regimentation of the office had caused him to fall out of love.

But Mueller assured me that he is grateful for the experience nonetheless. Working at Daniel Frisch Architecture, he was exposed to the intersection of design, architecture and art, which later inspired his passion for photography. “[I was interested in] all the layers of what photography could be,” Mueller said.

A casual interest in architectural photography grew into a full-blown fascination with fine art photography. Mueller was completely hooked. He calls it his first serious foray into art — a gateway drug.

After architecture, Mueller joined a startup while still scouring the concrete jungle for a graduate school to suit his tinkering soul. He was miserable at his job and had resolved to dedicate his time to educational pursuits. He found his home at NYU with ITP. After moving into an apartment with a few ITP alumni and seeing all they’d done post-grad, Mueller knew that it was exactly the community he was looking for.

ITP gave him a creative outlet that suited his practical skills, allowing him to blend the process of engineering, which he loves, with art.

In order to fully dedicate himself

to his pieces and working with his peers, he’s since left his job and is now a full-time student and artist.

In the short time Mueller’s been at NYU, he’s created pieces using various mediums, including photography, motion pictures, artificial light, electronics, self-contained systems and software, including Max (MSP/Jitter) and p5.js. His works span everything from computer-generated, pulsating fields of patterns and colors called Generative Works to Reverie Field, an interactive experience that allows visitors to reflect on the nature of memory through audio, visual and sensory stimuli and the varied pulsating of strings of lightbulbs.

Morgan Mueller is humble to a fault, despite having worked in four different fields in the three years since his college graduation. However, when speaking about his work, Mueller’s tone shifts. The earnest professionalism with which he approaches his art is apparent — he will go to bat for his work.

“I don’t want to pigeonhole myself so early in my career,” Mueller said. “It’s about using whatever medium, software or technology seems appropriate for a piece.”

In defining new media art, he points to the example of personal inspiration Nam June Paik, a Korean American artist active in the latter half of the last century whose works made use of cathode ray tube television sets.

“I think for his day, he was a new media artist,” Mueller said, “Really, it’s any kind of technology

that art historians wouldn’t consider fine art.”

Mueller acknowledges the intrinsic value of visually appealing art, but it isn’t his thing. He is drawn to making socio-political statements with his work through what he calls a “research-based art practice.” Inspired by predictive policing algorithms that use social credit scores to determine bail values and the like, Mueller created the Predictive Policing Awareness Machine.

PPAM consists of a yellow flower sitting precariously perched above a blender — the flower represents a person of color in the United States, and the blender represents the unjust justice system. Above the flower, a dropper is suspended on a ring stand. The dropper begins to squeeze liquid onto the flower when someone approaches, and the blade starts to spin at the rate at which a black individual is incarcerated relative to a white individual, which, it turns out, is quite fast.

Eventually, the individual is consumed by the broken justice system. The flower loses its balance and plummets into the blender. Through PPAM, Mueller hopes to draw attention to the inherent flaws of these predictive policing methods.

Much of Mueller’s best work comes from collaboration, and more than anything, he is grateful for both the critiques and compliments he receives from the artists at ITP. At the same time, he is already imparting the wisdom he’s gained

in his quarter century of life to others. Through a program called CS 4 All, Mueller teaches the coding that he uses for his pieces to high schoolers in lower-income communities who lack opportunities to achieve technological literacy.

“Maybe some kids aren’t as excited about coding as others,” he tells me, “but I can show them how to do cool sh-t.”

Mueller dreams of working with a community of people dedicated to social good while continuing to make pieces that redefine form, structure and technique.

If you look closely at Mueller’s story, you’ll see he grows not through transformation but aggregation, building a repository of ideas that he cares about by being open to the people and things around him. When Mueller picked up art, he had no intention of dropping engineering. As he develops as a scholar, he has no intention of slowing down his efforts to advance social good Raising others up, learning from his peers and making pieces with a purpose — Mueller is a modern-day Renaissance man. There doesn’t seem to be a limit to what he can pursue, but no matter his future achievements, he will no doubt maintain his humble attitude and pragmatic planning style.

So, while Mueller is looking ahead at his artistic future, he also has simpler goals at hand.

“I’d also just like to pay off my student loans, man.”

Email Fareid El Gafy at felgafy@nyunews.com.

Reverie Field 2018

Courtesy of Morgan Mueller

“Reverie Field” is an installation that engages not just the physical senses, but something much more abstract: memory. Using force-sensing resistor sensors connected to 15 light bulbs, the installation allows memories to materialize in the form of light patterns. The installation is paired with a headset and a console in which the FSR sensors are installed.

Once the user dons the headphones and places their palm on the console, an audio guide prompts them to recall a recent memory and focus

specifically on the emotions associated with it. They are prompted to add pressure to their fingertips according to how they feel. The FSR sensors respond to the changing pressure, causing the light bulbs to light up and dim accordingly, creating a light show unique to each viewer.

The experience comes to a climactic end as the pattern of the lighting is fixed and looped, allowing viewers to step back and review their memories manifested in physical form. The viewer is left in a lingering state of reverie, before the lights dim and fade out.

Morgan Mueller’s Reverie Field isn’t just an installation. It’s an experience that allows participants — such as NYU President Andrew Hamilton, above — to translate their memories and emotions associated with them into patterns and sequences of light. Once the participant finishes their exploration, they find themselves surrounded by their memories and feelings in the form of unique light patterns.

Predictive Policing Awareness Machine 2019

“Predictive Policing Awareness Machine” is a social statement on the police’s use of artificial intelligence for risk assessment.

Built on a ring stand, the machine consists of two parts — an eyedropper and a blender, representative of the predictive policing system. Between them sits a flower, delicately balanced on the blender.

An acrylic slip attached to a high-torque servomotor squeezes the eyedropper, causing the essence of a durian, a notoriously pungent fruit, to drip onto the flower. This action creates a sensory juxtaposition of visual beauty and olfactory disgust: what was once perceived as perfect becomes contaminated.

When the eyedropper is not contaminating

the flower from above, the blender is rattling below it. The blender operates asynchronously to the servomotor, activated by the powerswitch tail. After it is activated, the blender continues to be triggered at time intervals correlating to the rate at which black individuals are incarcerated due to systemic bias.

These alternating actions continue until the flower falls into the blender and is violently shredded. The flower is representative of all the people who are vulnerable in the hands of a system that should exist to protect them.

This brutal imagery is meant to demonstrate how some people who fall into the jaws of the U.S. criminal justice system never come out the same.

Courtesy of Morgan Mueller

According to Mueller, “The Predictive Policing Awareness Machine” he created “is meant to bring awareness to the corrupt predictive policing epidemic occurring in the United States” The sculpture is interactive, too — if a viewer approaches it, the mechanism gets triggered. Durian fruit essence is squeezed onto a flower, which falls into the blender. The blender rotates at the rate at which black individuals are incarcerated in the U.S.

Metamorphosis 2019

Courtesy of Morgan Mueller

Mueller is fascinated by the way humanity is becoming more digitalized. His project-performance, Metamorphosis, explores precisely that. The audio-visual performance explores the question of what it means to be human in an alternative or a futuristic universe where humanity is entirely digitalized.

“Metamorphosis” is an interactive audio and visual performance that explores the digitization of humanity.

As one performer inserts a microscope slide into a microscope, the two screens light up with moving images of organic matter with Steph Butchko’s haunting, minimalist music in the background.

The process continues for a while, before a monotonous, automated voice declares “System error: anomaly detected,” destabilizing the piece and sending the images into a flurry of glitches. The music intensifies and heavy breaths become audible. Soon, the images evolve into digitally edited representations — like a pencil sketch put through Photoshop. They become less grainy, more aesthetic, and yet, less

recognizable as organic human cells.

Then the automated voice reenters, calling for a “baseline test” in which the viewer is prompted to repeat words.

The voice announces “test failure” and that the “unidentified subject is highly contagious.” The face of one of the performers now flashes periodically on the screen, lacking any texture of organic matter. The image goes through a series of alterations, until the human face is barely recognizable. As the screen fades to black, the voice declares “system override” which cues a final slideshow of pixelated, black-and-white images that mimic the movement of the original organic matter. They represent an extreme metamorphoses of what makes a human, human.

Project Descriptions by

MEGAN SHEW Contributing Writer

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