Cat

This semester, as I meandered through the sensory stimulating insanity of the ITP Winter Show, I found myself really enjoying simplicity - which was, strangely enough, often produced by students in the Intro classes (possibly an indication of amazing talent in the class of 2012??). 

I thought ByteLight by Jack Kalish and Gabriella Levine, an installation of switches and lights representing an individual LCD pixel, and the bit data that defines the color of the pixel, was really well executed and quite beautiful. 

I’m always intrigued by physical objects that react to crowdsourced data. Emotbots by Alexander Kozovski, was an ‘installation’ of two robots that had pre-programmed photophilic and photophobic behavior. Each behavior manifested itself through specific tweets which were parsed for emoticons and sent to the bots wirelessly as commands. Think We Feel Fine on a much simpler and physical scale. 

The most fun to play with was Matthew Rader and William Jennings’s Viral Like Waterfalls which allows a user to “DJ” (change music clips) by applying a certain amount of pressure to silly string spray cans. A FAIL though that the cans were out of string when I arrived :(

In terms of applications that I wish I had to test right now, I was very intrigued by iStride by Ahn Ly and Lily Szajnberg. This device (soon to be iPhone App) allows a runner to measure their cadence and keep themselves between 85-90 cycles per minute via an auditory signal in their headphones.

In the realm of devices you carry with you that collect data, I thought that OpenRTMS by Michael Doherty was quite interesting, although you could tell it still had a bit of a way to go. One of my biggest complaints about devices like Fitbit is that the data they collect ends up locked into Fitbit.com itself. OpenRTMS seems to focus on this data being more portable in addition to having applications beyond personal health. 

Their were quite a few nice wearable projects in the show. The simplicity in design and execution and the attractiveness of Fe Wearables by Noah Waxman makes me actually want to buy it (which you can - and I probably will - do on his website). While We Flashy by Alex Vessels and Mindy Tchieu, is nice looking reflective clothing that I would also totally buy if a rode a bike (which I hope to be doing soon). 

Of all the data vis projects, I got really hooked on Reading the News Anew by Margaret McKenna. From a visual perspective, it was quite an interesting way to see the news divided up by continent and topic in this fashion (I have been really interested in projects that attempt to do this lately). When actually using the site though, I wished that the animation didn’t move so quickly and that I could actually stop it. I also wish that more data from the articles was actually pulled into the visualization instead of being taken to the news on an external page. Nice idea that perhaps needs a bit more work.