I think it is safe to say that for most of us, our relationship with technology is a love-hate affair. Tech gadgets that start out as luxuries quickly become must-have necessities. I have become hooked on invention, ingenuity, and innovative products over the past few weeks while doing research for my thesis at ITP. The question I keep asking myself is whether these problem-solving products actually make the world a better place?

Woomba
Woomba is a small disc-like object that takes care of all of your feminine-hygiene needs. Activate Woomba and it does the rest. Woomba’s built in sensors can tell when you’re not at your freshest and that’s when Woomba goes to work. Its gentle but powerful onboard cleaning agents assure results every time. (Developed by Saturday Night Live)

Talking Tissue Box
Each time you reach for a tissue from the Ah-Choo Talking Tissue Box, it imitates your illness with one of six sneezing and coughing sounds. They say laughter is the best medicine so with the Sneezing Tissue Box you’ll be better than new in no time. (Developed by Baron Bob)

LED Menorah
An updated take on the traditional hanukkiyah, the nine-armed Hanukkah candelabrum. Two candles are lit on the first night of Hanukkah (one “real” candle plus the lighter candle, or shamash), three on the second night, right up to nine on the eighth night. (Developed by Evil Mad Science)

Zen Dog
De-stress Your Dog with Music and Touch. Tap into the power of music to calm your dog and learn the art of gentle massage to improve your pal’s mental and physical well-being. (Developed by Janet Marlow)

Sportbinox
Sportbinox are hands free binoculars that offer an optional am/fm radio to help follow the game, or just listen to relaxing music while enjoying nature. (Developed by Sportbinox)

Ion Steamer
Apparently, blasting your face with steam is good for your skin. Who knew? Even better than normal steam is the fancy-pants steam this Panasonic Nano-Care Ion Steamer pumps out. They claim it “creates ion steam particles that are extremely small, thereby enabling the moisturizing steam to deeply penetrate the outer layers of a user’s skin.” (Developed by Panasonic)

The Journey to Wild Divine Biofeedback
The Journey to Wild Divine is the first “inner-active” computer adventure that combines ancient breathing and meditation with modern biofeedback technology for total mind-body wellness. Progress through the realm using the power of your thoughts, feelings, breath and awareness. The Journey to Wild Divine is not just a game, it’s a tool to reduce stress and improve physical and mental health. (Developed by Wild Divine Project)

1. Potent Objects
Potent Objects playfully examines the way we ascribe emotion to inanimate technologies. The work parallels current research in ‘affective computing,’ in which the capability of sensing and conveying emotion is built into computing devices. (Work by Camille Utterback)

2. levelHead
levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. (Work by Julian Oliver)

3. The Jitterbox
Change the tune and watch the beautiful tiny dancer shake and shimmy along with any song! But beware the talky talk radio, this dancer loves to boogie but hates chit chat! An interactive radio from the 1940’s! (Work by Gabe Barcia-Colombo)

4. Whirl
In Whirl memory and nostalgia is revealed as a warped phenomena. The viewer’s breath is mapped such that blowing a pinwheel controls the playback of both record player and video, warping nostalgic sound from a found record of old rhyming favorites and imagery of wildly physical play on turn of the century (19th to 20th) circle swing. (Work by Christa Erickson)

5. Visual Attract & Attack
27 touch screen adaptions of Han Hoogerbrugge’s web animation series NAILS presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei. (Work by Han Hoogerbrugge)

6. Machinema
The animation creates an ecosystem of mechanical and natural elements coming into life on the screens with the spin of a big physical crank. The project explores the connections/tensions between digital and analog, between natural and industrial, revealing the living spirit in the machine and the mechanical cycles in nature. (Work by Adi Marom and Filippo Vanucci)

7. Experimental Devices for Performance
Experimental Devices for Performance are wearable and handheld devices used for media interaction in experimental performance. Being performer oriented, the devices make the connection between media and performer inseparable. The performer affects the media through the devices and the devices affect the performer. Together, they become the performance. (Work by Andrew Schneider)

8. Funky Forest
Funky Forest is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. (Work by Theodore Watson)

9. The Taste of Daily Life
Presented at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, in this video artwork the visitor can use their breathe to blow the interactive video to make it comes to life. (Work by Huang)

10. Cantique No. 3
A choreographer, dancer and performer, Marie Chouinard produced an entire series of works that originated with filmed choreography featuring faces, grimaces and voices. (Work by Marie Chouinard)

A collection of images that will help inspire the design of my thesis project at ITP. Gathered from a wide array of sources, some of the artists’ and designers’ works assembled into my thesis mood board include Han Hoogerbrugge, Rafaeal Rozendall, Morgan Guegan, paperad, Redman, Slick Rick, and Craig Robinson.

You can view each individual image from my mood board on my Flickr page, over here.

Presented at the ITP Winter Show 2009 and NIME 2009, Rusty Business is a video sequencer that produces electronically controlled cartoon antics using large inflatable hammers.

A database of slapstick comedy gags are executed when inflatable hammers hit push button switches. The interactions performed by the users handling of the hammer produces a unique visual and auditory experience onto the projected montage displays. Every hit from the inflatable hammer triggers a different, unexpected and shocking reaction from the character, conveying his struggles with work, sickness and modern day insanities.

A database of slapstick comedy gags, all performed by a silent comedy character named Rusty, are executed when inflatable hammers smack one of nine push buttons that each accompany one of nine video clips projected on a screen.

The interactions performed by the users handling of the hammer produces a unique visual and auditory experience onto the projected montage displays. Every hit from the inflatable hammer triggers a different, unexpected and shocking reaction from the character, conveying his struggles with work, sickness and modern day insanities. The music and sound effects that accompany Rustys clumsy actions evoke the illusion of space by taking on the function of the background images.

Today I presented my new project Rusty Business at the ITP Winter Show 2009. My project composes video sequences out of gag comedy animations when large inflatable hammers hit push button switches. I will be posting complete documentation for this work by the end of the week.

This week I performed my new interactive comedy project “Rusty Business” at the ITP New Interfaces for Musical Expression Concert 2009 in Brooklyn at Southpaw. My project is a video sequencer that produces electronically controlled cartoon antics when large inflatable hammers hit jumbo push button switches. My performance also featured a guest appearance by Elie Zananiri who played the role as my character’s boss.

Click here to view more photos from the show. (Courtesy of LEESEAN)

The web site I designed for the University of South Carolina Aiken’s online student magazine was recently launched. The site’s overall purpose is to provide a news resource for student’s studying at the University. My focus on their redesign was to create a more youthful and fun look to help students become more interested to engage in on campus social life, take a look.

The Joy of Smoking is a collection of humorous video clips about a smoker who will go to almost any lengths for a nicotine hit. This is the first prototype of my Headsprung video sculpture series that I am currently developing.

Breaking apart the 5″ Coby Digital Picture frame I purchased from Coby Electronics.

Special thanks to Eric Rosenthal and Matt Richard for helping me out with hacking and custom fitting the LCD screen onto the manikin display.

This is a business card design that I will be using to help showcase my new portfolio web site that I am currently developing. The typeface that I chose to represent my name with is the Frutiger font. I used ITC Avante Garde Gothic Bold for the headline of the card, and Arial for the content. I expect my new web site to be completed and published by November.

For this week’s assignment in my Visual Communications class, each student was asked to design three expressive words considering guidelines in typography. In addition, each student was asked to create six examples of their name choosing font preferences with at least one example of serif, san serif, decorative and script.