Alexa, Call Mom! is an IoT interactive installation, created to answer the question: What if Amazon Alexa could channel the dead?
It’s Mother’s Day and you are trying to contact your recently deceased mother. You go to her old apartment where you are prompted to use a new “service” from the Amazon smart home device, Alexa, that provides seamless communication with the dead.
Oscillating between Alexa and her ghostly self, Mom unlocks the power of Alexa to possess all WiFi enabled devices. Communicating through various appliances, Mom asks you to perform tasks in the room that open new modes of communication, and reveal an increasingly immersive storyline. As your role shifts from passive caller to sleuth, you begin to expose secrets and discover more about Mom.
Alexa, Call Mom! Is an interactive installation that uses smart home devices to lead participants through an immersive séance experience. It is a parodic re-imagining of the classic horror séance and an exploration of the tense relationship between technology and our home.
// Alexa, Call Mom! was selected for Sundence New Frontier Story Lab Residency, 2018
My Heart is in the East” is an artistic exploration of life on Mars. It asks questions about how life and culture could be brought to the Red Planet.
The installation teleports the old age experience of a live in one place, but the focus of heart and hopes in another. Using Augmented Reality technology, the work transforms traditional Jewish objects into futuristic works of art.
Jews in Space is a project of Tech Tribe, a Brooklyn based organization dedicated to making events for people in technology and digital media. It's made possible through the support of UJA-Federation of New York, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and Kamin Health.
As a Media Lab Fellow at The Economist, I created multiple prototypes exploring AR Storytelling in the context of the publication’s thought-provoking journalistic content.
AR experiences were created with Unity, ARKit and ARCore.
// Project Status: under development
// Nitzan Bartov, Hyphen-Labs | Jan 2017
NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (NSAF) is an award winning three-part digital narrative that sits at the intersection product design, virtual reality, and neuroscience.
Inspired by the lack of multidimensional representations of black women in technology. The NSAF products range from sunblock for traveling through the multiverse, to earrings embedded with cameras that offer protection and visibility, the VR experience is set in a NeuroCosmetology lab where black women are pioneering techniques of brain optimization and cognitive enhancement. Finally, scientific research exploring the neurological and physiological impact of showing images of empowered black women as well as content made for and by women of color.
The NSAF VR experience transports our viewers into a NeuroCosmetology lab, a reimagined black hair salon, placing the viewer into a black woman’s body giving a glimpse into a speculative future of black women pioneering brain research and neuromodulation through the culturally specific ritual of haircare.
// www.nsaf.space
// NSAF has been shown at Sundance Film Fest, SXSW, Tribeca Film Fest (Jury Honorable Mention), Gray Area Art & Technology Festival, Primer Speculative Futures Conference, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Stony Island Arts Bank & Rebuild Foundation, New Inc: Versions Festival.
// Press: Huffington Post, New Yorker, Wired, Indiewire, TechCrunch, The Verge, MIT-Open Doc Lab, Voices of VR, CoolHunting, Colorlines, Voices of America, Forbes, NPR, i-D Vice, The Root Video, The Root, Engadget, NBC, Vocativ, TrendHunter, Copywrite Magazine, FastCo, The Guardian, Mashable, Telegraph, Wired: Hyperface, Creators Project
// Created by: Hyphen-Labs [ Ashley Baccus-Clark, Ece Tankal, Carmen Aguilar y Wedg] and Nitzan Bartov.
// Project team: Todd Bryant, Halime Maloof, Lajune Mcmillian, Michelle Cortese, Adam Harvey, [ab]screenwear, Memoire, Mert Çetinkaya, Dyane Harvey, Ludmila Leiva, Adam Sobolew, Future Media Labs, Mind Traveler Design
The Artificial and the Intelligent (A&I) is an episodic soap opera VR experience, where Artificial Intelligence is mediating human connection, even from beyond the grave.
Through embodiment and unique flashback mechanics A&I explores VR as a medium of intimacy and reflection.
Inspired by 90’s daily soap operas, every episode of A&I takes place in a different room in the ‘family villa’, and released separately.
// A&I is currently under development.
// A&I_S01E01 prototype was shown in VR Salon at Art&&Code Festival, Oct 2016.
Glitch Architecture is an ongoing research on the appropriation of the glitch aesthetic to architecture.
By developing alternative workflows for the disruption and intervention of Algorithms that generate 3D geometries, this work examines this appropriation on facade segments of the iconic Azrieli Towers Complex, Tel Aviv.
Glitch_Architectures/Facade_Segments was created for Test Patterns, The Current Museum's opening show, set to interrogate how signals configure images, how concepts resolve into focus, and what patterns we can set in motion for the future of art, November 2016.
Motion Impressions is a Video Installation exploring spatial temporarily created by light and movement.
Long-exposure photography captures one element that conventional photography does not: time. Using long-duration shutter speed, the camera neglects the trivial and everyday details, to tell a story about light and change.
Through photography and code, this work gives form for to the invisible ‘light tunnels’ created by the movement of the New York Subway.
// Motion Impressions was presented at DKNY SOHO Storefront Gallery, as part of a collaboration between DKNY and The New Museum.
Propeller is a series of artifacts exploring form and motion through time, by using the 3-D slit-scan game mechanics developed for Horizon - a 4-D adventure puzzle video game.
Horizon is being developed by my game studio n-Dimensional.
// Propeller was exhibited at Playdate, the first annual babycastles gallery residency show. Jul, 2015.
Glitch Architecture is a research on the appropriation of the glitch aesthetic to architecture.
By developing alternative workflows for the disruption and intervention of Algorithms that generate 3D geometries, Glitch Architectures examines this appropriation on the iconic Azrieli Towers Complex, Tel Aviv.
top: Azrieli Tower Complex, 1:20 Facade detail, 3D print.
bottom: Azrieli tower Complex, 1:200, 3D print.
// Glitch Architecture was exhibited at Oops: When Technology Fails, at the Hansen House Gallery, Jerusalem. March, 2015.
E. Killing lives in a 4D simulation of the 3D world. It's a recording – everything has already happened. Her device, The Horizon, reconstructs her world in time slices, like a slit-scan camera. She needs to find her way out of the simulator.
Horizon, n-Dimensional’s first video game, is a fluid puzzle adventure, with gameplay happening in a three-dimensional slice of four-dimensional space-time. Employing the mathematical principles of slit-scan photography, yet adding a further dimension, Horizon is a distinctly aesthetic exploration of geometry and temporal causality.
// SOFTlab | July 2015 | New York, NY
Cumulus is an interactive installation that reacts to sound with light. The cell like structure is meant to create behaviors that mimic the deliberate yet erratic behavior of lightning. The piece is much lighter than the overall volume it occupies. Much like sponge the structure relies on redundancies and connections that cannot be achieved from a grid, giving it a soft cloud like shape. The irregularity of the network like structure imbues the piece with a playful personality as it reacts in unpredictable ways to environmental sound.
Various behaviors were programmed for the piece, each responding to the amplitude and various ranges of surrounding sound. Each time sound in the space reaches a certain volume the piece activates.
The interactivity is achieved through a series of physical and digital systems working together. The structure is made of over 200 acrylic segments connected with over 100 unique 3D printed joints. Inside of the structure is a network of individually addressable LED strands. Overall 70 meters of LEDs were used to activate the whole structure. A processing UI was built to analyse the sound, activate the programmed behaviors, and communicate with Arduino microcontrollers that dispersed signals activating the particular LEDs that corresponded with each segment.
// Comuluse was installed at RAB Gallery Chelsiea, New York. July, 2015.
// Photos: Alan Tansey
// SOFTlab | May 2014 | New York, NY
The "We Are Flowers" Installation was designed specifically for the New York flagship Melissa Shoe store and inspired by the company moto: "We are flowers". We wanted to carry the fun and organic forms of the shoe collection into the design.
It was a technological and engineering challenge to design something that would be light and natural from the large scale of the store down to a single pedal. The installation was made by laser cutting 20,000 flowers and an engineered Mylar net that is made of over 4,000 unique pieces. We used Grasshopper to break down the parametric surface into individual parts small enough to be flat cut on a laser cutter to assemble and erect the entire surface.
// We Are Flowers was installed at Melissa Gallery SOHO, New York. May, 2014.
// Photos: Alan Tansey
Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture & Urban Design exhibition of student work has been curated, designed, and fabricated by a group of students in a course taught by Michael Szivos with Nitzan Bartov.
We've worked with a group of students to produce a large scale installation in the Hazel and Robert H. Siegel Gallery. The course produced an installation that explores digital fabrication methods as while showcasing the previous year’s student work. The opening of the exhibition coincides with In Process, the annual publication of student work. The curatorial component of the exhibition is meant to contrast the more traditional way of indexing the work through In Process.
The exhibition featured architectural models floating on floating platforms. The platforms were suspended by an engineered surface that acted both as a single structural surface and a cloud like filter. The underside of each platform was creating using attenuated cardboard tubes to create a surface thatguided visitors to specific locations on the platform where they could view the interior of the surface. Once inside these viewing zones visitors were able to view the models at what would be considered street or person level (although a more realistic view, an over overlooked vantage point for models). The images of student work from Spring 2013 to Fall 2014 were arranged under the field of cardboard tubes as if they are being projected from the tubes. The work was packed together in clusters showcasing the variety and organic nature of how work is produced within the culture of the school.
The hanging installation was made of custom cut laser cut Mylar panels. This surface acts as one piece, only forming its final shape in tension through the weight of the model platforms. The surface weighs under 20 lbs while suspending a weight of over 500 lbs. The bottom of the surface is clad in custom tyvek panels to obscure the models. This encourages the exploration and overall engagement of visitors with the interior of the piece. The interior experience is not only a surprise, but a unique way to view the physical output of students in an isolated and continuous environment.
// Professor : Michael Szivos with Nitzan Bartov.
// Design Team : Guanxi Chen,Yong-Chun Choi, Jeian Jeong, Minji Jung, Che-Chung Lin, Yung-Fu Lin, Peter Liu, Sao-Wei Lu, Kesra Mansuri, So Jung Nam, Gee-Ana Sanchez, Thea Sarkissian, Fei-Fei Song, Alaa Tarabzouni, Sean Whalen, Ryan Whitby
// The work was installed at at the Hazel and Robert H. Siegel Gallery, School of Architecture, Higgins Hall, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. May 2014.
// Photos: Alan Tansey
// SOFTlab | winter 2013 | New York, NY
Considering the Quake: Seismic Design on Edge was an exhibition hosted by the American Institute of Architects ant the CFA in New York.
Along with designing the overall exhibition Softlab also produced an interactive installation in collaboration with ARUP. The two story kinetic sculpture, with it's top part seen from the street level, was a center piece of the exhibition, visualized the effects of an earthquake and some of the considerations that are taken into account while designing buildings in seismic regions.
The sculpture invites visitors to create and adjust their own seismic wave that wiggles the entire sculpture, tuning the installation to see various zones of resonance within a grid of pipes. Each pipe had a weight that was calibrates at various heights in a graph throughout the grid. These weights alter the natural period of the wave zones of wiggling pipes would move or dissipate as you find periods coincide with the various pipes. As with buildings during an earthquake, each pipe resonated at specific frequencies depending on the height of the weight.
// Considering the Quake: Seismic Design on Edge was exhibited at The Center for Architecture ,NYC. Winter 2013.
Glitch Architectures is a research on the appropriation of the glitch aesthetic to architecture. The Glitch, an error or 'bug', created by the disruption of electronic data, is often exploited for its aesthetics and exposure of the host system. From its' very parasitic nature, the glitch is dependent on both the data and the generating algorithm of the system it disrupts. This project examines glitches in the context of geometry compression, in linear and polynomial models, on details and entire systems.
By developing alternative workflows for the disruption and intervention of Algorithms that generate 3D geometries, Glitch Architectures examines this appropriation on several iconic buildings. The Azrieli Tower Complex in Tel Aviv was chosen as the main research, but so were some classic examples such as Villa Savoye and Villa Rotonda.
// Glitch Architectures was created as a B.Arch thesis project instructed by Dr. Eran Neumann at Tel Aviv University.
// Residence Studio Project, TAU School of Architecture, spring 2011
Life, Disrupted is a design for an H-Shaped apartment complex, with a perturbed base grid. The basic floorspace was redesigned by rotating the floorplan's symmetry axis slightly (<5°) around itself and superimposing the two. The newly formed edges and definitions of the superimposed grid gives way to a multitude of artchitectural interpretations.
Taking inspiration from Gordon Matta Clark's series of building incisions, Life, Disrupted is an attempt to find a new aesthetic by emphasizing gaps and absences in familiar dwelling environments.
//Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv, fall 2012.
Flexi--Blvd created a Speakers' Corner and performance area through urban intervention.