Research Group Projects and Descriptions

The Computing Culture group creates unique media technologies for cultural applications. Projects will result in specific works of art, but will also help further an understanding of the relationships between new media and cultural production. Some of the strategies we utilize include interventions in contemporary consumer electronics, creating special events for public situations, and applying technical research and development to cultural agendas that wouldn't normally receive them. Our emphasis is on physically embodied, rather than screen-based or virtual, work. Specific research directions include: creating new technologies for cultural groups or agendas that don't usually get them—one example is the DJ I, Robot project, the first random access robotic model of a human hip-hop DJ; developing alternate applications of existing technologies—for example, the possibilities of console computer games have far outweighed their actual applications, and we hope to find new interfaces, economic models, and development strategies might make them as expressive a medium as film or photography; and understanding the unique opportunities afforded by new media forms, such as telepresence, or extending contemporary art forms, such as video installation.

About Us examines technology workplaces from a feminist perspective. The objective is to mobilize workers to collect simple gender-specific data, such as the male-female ratio of their workplace. This data will be made available to others to inform performances, wearables, and games. The idea is to create collaboratively a data infrastructure to support projects and perspectives that shed light on the complicated issue of gender imbalance in spaces of high-tech labor.

Urban noise pollution has been a problem since the days of Buddha. Walkmans help, but issues of both social and accoustic isolation have become more urgent with the popularity of the iPod. Addressing these issues may require a look at how recorded music devices work at a fundamental level. Ambient Addition is a Walkman-like device, built on a DSP core, that synthesizes music by sampling the sound around the listener, creating harmony and rhythm from the chaos and noise of the environment. By simultaneously opening music to incorporate the environment, but also turning the environment into music, the sound stays fresh and the listener is encouraged to explore new territory.

A mapping technology that transports one into the world of another, Cherry Blossoms gives witness to the tragedy of war. A backpack is outfitted with a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative locations are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death. A technology for empathy, Cherry Blossoms honors the human cost of war.

By providing advance information technologies and mediated social networks, we hope to allow communities to build a representation of and monitor an extractive industry's practices. We are developing an innovative form of community collaboration to monitor, and respond to environmental health hazards. Energy production has significant—if often elusive—health, environmental, and social consequences. This project attempts to create an innovative information and coordination mechanism to map those consequences, via Web-based tools and other forms of media and communication. These tools will be distributed through communities in Colorado, allowing community members to generate collaboratively an interactive map of regional gas development by recording the observable practices of local gas development, from the location of waste material pits, to reported health problems and pollution events. The action map would ultimately amplify the force with which landowners and industry workers can collectively influence gas development policies through negotiation, regulation, legislation, or litigation.

Are electronic instruments better that generate their own power? Can the movement of the sound generation be tightly coupled to the power generation, as opposed to merely modulation a large power reserve, as in traditional instruments? What useful musical artifacts/affordances can be created through this technology? Can acoustic and electronic musical instruments be successfully merged?

Exquisite Corpus is a collaborative writing application that aims to explore new and more "indirect" forms of collaboration similar to those in open-source software or in Wikipedia. EC allows collaborators to contribute short vignettes in traditional "scene" (i.e., screenplay or script) form and then, using heuristics and AI techniques, helps to integrate these into larger aggregate works suitable for use as a movie or play script. These aggregate works aim to provide consistent characters and themes through the work. The system provides a platform for investigating and improving computer support of indirect collaboration.

Freedom Flies is an inexpensive, open-sourced Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for free press and human rights applications. Made from off-the-shelf parts (bicycle rims, weed whacker, water bottle) it can carry a payload of 30 pounds for over three hours, surveying locations off-limits or too dangerous for journalists.

Domestic violence is a widespread and critical issue internationally, unique in the low rates of victims seeking help or treatment. The IPV Clothing project is a wearable computing system designed to intervene in domestic-violence situations and explore therapeutic potential. The wearable system is in the form of "smart clothing" coupled with a simple artificial intelligence "chatbot." The apparel component utilizes fabric-based pressure sensors to measure and categorize forces and impacts on the wearer's body, giving the system an understanding of the wearer's bodily condition in terms of the abuse. The AI system processes that information and interacts with the victim, initiating supportive conversations in a safe and secure instant messaging environment.

Omo is an alternative relational object. While similar to "carebots" and companion robots, Omo draws on ongoing Machine Therapy work revealing the psychological, social, and political dynamics between people and machines. As a result, Omo's role is empathic and sometimes unexpected rather than normative. Omo breathes and senses the breathing of anyone interacting closely with it, matching--or seeking to lead--patterns of breathing. Omo does not always privilege soothing.test

Selectricity (formerly HyperChad) is a Web-based voting system that supports anonymous and voter-verifiable balloting, and includes an election-methods library that implements a variety of election techniques, including several preferential systems. Unlike most voting projects, Selectricity does not attempt to address the issues raised in mainstream political elections. Instead, it provides a simple set of tools that small groups and organizations can use to incorporate computationally complex decision-making into new areas, and for purposes where they ordinarily would find such decision-making prohibitively complex. By supporting a variety of election methods, it provides a way for users to explore and compare the effects of different voting systems and, ultimately, come to better decisions.

TextNet is a "distributed" wiki. While normal wikis are designed for groups to create a single document collaboratively, TextNet is built for authors writing multiple linked documents and texts with overlapping or partially overlapping content. TextNet helps writers to compute, track, and merge differences between diverged documents. The intention is to help writers easily collaborate where possible—while differing where necessary—in an ad hoc and lightweight manner. The project builds on thinking and tools from the world of distributed source management and version-control systems used in the free and open-source software community.

While technologists scramble to develop technologies for production and storage of environmentally friendly electricity, we must consider our personal roles in conserving energy. Thighmaster balances comfort and discomfort to achieve sustainable change. In addition to potentially decreasing a user's energy use, Thighmaster can also relieve the less easily measured—but no less real—feeling of individual powerlessness in the face of accelerated climate change. The system consists of a personal techno-garter, inspired by the "Opus Dei" cilice popularized in Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code, worn on the thigh, that communicates wirelessly to a set of low-power sensors measuring the wearer's personal energy consumption. If the wearer's electricity use exceeds a certain limit, the device plunges stainless-steel thorns into the thigh to remind users of both their complicity in the planet's demise and mortality.