asli sevinc

From the very beginning, the two Big Challenges I wanted to explore for Big Screens were interactivity and performance. I asked these questions to myself over and over:

• How can you engage the audience in a meaningful interaction without chaos and in a new, original way?
• How can the interaction with the screen, with the images on the screen, with the sound and/or with the performers be fully connected and interesting?
• What will be the role of the performers? Will the crowd be the performers or will there be separate performers that the audience can watch?
• What are the new ways in which I can create physical, non-mobile based interaction tools? Physical computing, sound or camera vision?
• What is going to be my inspiration? What is a content that is close to my heart, yet beautiful and plentiful? What is the content that will keep feeding the work throughout the project and keep adding something fresh to itself, even in the last week before the Big Night?
• How can the piece be abstract and yet, meaningful and interesting to the audience?
• How will the process surpass the night? How will the process of creating this work be more important than the performance night?

• Adi, Filippo and I spent hours brainstorming in the past three weeks. It was extremely helpful for me to process, form and re-form my idea. Even though I’m very nervous about working on my own, I know I’m very excited to see my final piece on the screens and that motivates me a lot.

So here is what I propose:

I want to bring in New York to the screens, by way of using her countless patterns. The patterns on her ground, on her buildings, on her bridges, on her doors, on her trains.. I want to mix and overlay and remix the patterns with each other and create a collage that I will keep feeding all throughout the semester.

There are a few ways I want to create interaction, from which I will have to choose one:

• Place 3 to 5 ladders in front of the screens. They are a reference to fire-escape ladders in New York. Have people from the audience or performers climb the ladders to control, change, warp, manipulate the images on the screen. DREAM: Control sound as well.

* Sensors: Range sensors on top or Force sensors on the steps

• Build 3 to 5 free-standing pulley structures in front of the screens / distributed amongst the crowd. Have people from the audience or performers pull the ropes to control, change, warp, manipulate the images on the screen. DREAM: Control sound as well.

* Sensors: Custom stretch sensors

I O NY is a personal map of gratitude I have for New York City. It tells 9 little stories about altruism and goodwill that I’ve experienced this past year. These stories helped me appreciate NY more for what it is and strengthened my enthusiasm to live here, despite all that happened, for which NY owes me big time.

Please follow the stories with the key that comes with the map. The stories are marked in order of my memory.

Story 1 is about a cry from the backseat of a car that made me realize that I’d dropped my green-blue silk scarf in the middle of the street, while running around to avoid getting soaked in the middle of a summer storm.

Story 2 is about a touch that saved me from breaking my neck when I was falling from the stairs that lead to the subway station.

Story 3 is about a taxi driver who helped me carry this enormous old-school desk up to my apartment that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to carry on my own.

Story 4 is about a search for a gold ring, which my mom used to wear 30 years ago, with the help of a handful of people that stopped dancing and knelt down to look for it with their cell phones during an 8bit concert. We couldn’t find the ring.

Story 5 is about a delivery guy, who went out of his way to show me how to get to the Williamsburg Bridge, when I was completely lost, disoriented, nervous and late for a meeting. (It was my first time crossing the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Story 6 is about a compliment that gave me confidence about my new super short haircut that I had gotten after years of having long hair.

Story 7 is about an advice that an old Polish lady gave me, when she saw me painfully scratching my Long Island mosquito bites at a bus stop. She said: “Those mosquitoes always find me, too.  Forget OFF! The best solution is Listerine. My husband is a gardener, and trust me, Listerine works better than anything.”

Story 8 is about a warning that woke me up from my jet-lagged nap on the 6th train, right before my stop, because the warner thought it didn’t seem like I’d be going up to the Bronx.

Story 9a, 9b and 9c is about a wallet that got lost 3 times and found its way back to my pocket with no loss or damage.

To make the long story short, I O NY; and this map is dedicated to the goodness of her.

My final for Technology as Identity took on a different path the last week I was working on the project. It was partly due to my limited programming skills, and the fact that I was unable to really get the effect that I wanted. (Looking at my previous video, you can see that blob detection is a ittle too flickery.) So I eventually decided to drop motion detection off and only used blob detection.

While working on it te code and building a space for the installation, I realized that I was feeling comfortable enough to interact with the piece, not only with physical movement, but also through performance. So during my presentation, I also did a little performance along with it, which I thought worked well with my piece, now called Fade Out. The Turkish words in the background dissolve slowly into English , but only those that don’t have translations stay capitalized.

I got amazing feedback from all the guest critics. I’ll write them down in depth this wee.

Here is a very first, unedited video documentation of my project. More videos to come later.

Fade Out: Documentation Version-1 from Asli Sevinc on Vimeo.

The hit new band “Spatial Media” just released a new album with 3 new singles! Here is their LP cover:

I decided to go with openFrameworks for this project, instead of Processing. I find that openFrameworks handles live video better. So, I wrote the code for reducing the viewer down to a silhouette and filling it up with black color. Here is the documentation:

Scratch Language(?): Silhouette code from Asli Sevinc on Vimeo.

The next step will be to fill up the sihouette with text, and then to integrate motion tracking to erase it. I’ll try to get that done by next week.

Meredith and I drew out the implementation diagram of Play’Round:

Based on the feedback we got from everyone in class last week, we tweaked the animation and visual interaction a little bit. Here is the new drawing we have:

Above is the first animation we want to get done. When the viewer touches the table, a glowing circle will appear on where she presses. The circle will rotate along its track for as long as the finger is on the table. As the circle is rotating, it will leave a trace behind and the associated track will be played.

I drew a diagram of the technical implementation of my final project on language as identity. Reminder: I should soon come up with a good name for my project.

Click here to view the high resolution png document.

For my final project, I want to explore the transformation I’m going through currently and feeling very strongly about: language attrition; the loss of my first language. This will be a project about language as identity and it will deal with the idea that losing your mother tongue means losing or altering a part of your identity profoundly.

Each day, I’m using my mother language, Turkish, less and less. Each day, English is replacing Turkish as my primary tool to think, to feel, to express myself, to talk to myself, to write, to communicate whatever I want to say to the world. As I’m completing my sixth year abroad, I can fully feel the effects of language attrition: my immediate reactions, my dreams are now in my acquired language. My mind speaks to me in English. I write in English when I’m drunk. I’m surprised to see that I started to talk to animals and babies in English, too, which I thought would always be in my mother tongue. Most interestingly to me, I’m at a point that I can picture myself communicating with my own children in English in the future.

This inevitable loss is not disturbing to me all the time. Usually, I don’t even think about it or notice it at all. But sometimes, it hits me that I’m losing my mother tongue, day by day. I feel that my most important connection to home is slowly weakening. Part of me, part of my identity is slowly eroding.

I want to build an interactive installation, where the viewer will experience the erasing of a language and replacing with another one. In my case, the viewer will erase Turkish and replace it with English, as much as she likes.

The interaction is two fold: The viewer will stand in front of the projected screen. She will be reduced to a silhouette. Once the silhouette is drawn, it’ll be filled up with Turkish words. The viewer, by waving her hand over her body, will scratch out the Turkish to reveal English underneath. The viewer may choose to scratch all of the first language, or she may choose to have some remainders left.

Here is a diagram of the installation:

Click here to view the high resolution png document.

I’m going to use a security camera for sensing, a projector for projection and Processing  for pixel analysis and graphics. The implementation diagram will follow soon.

déjà-vu is a sidewalk installation that aims to make the passerby articificially experience the feeling of déjà-vu. The system will sense the passerby, record her for 5 seconds, then project the video on a screen that is placed a few feet down the street, while the passerby is walking by the screen. The video will only be played once. If the passerby notices herself walking on the screen, she will experience a feeling very similar to déjà-vu.

Fresh-Back is a conceptual solution/therapeutic device designed for women to help them deal with sexism in the workplace and empower them via connecting with other women. Please visit the Fresh-Back blog for more information and to learn about how you can get your fresh-back, too!