Workshop Statement
Empathy Engine: Sonifying & Visualizing Media Effects Workshop teaches participants how to create generative sound and art compositions using data from the Empathy Engine. The empathy engine is an embodied multi-modal, cross-media experience that combines scientific rigor, creative expression and emerging technology to offer new insights into data science and media effects research through generative art and electronic music. It is comprised of biophysical sensors that capture, amplify and parse heart beat, body temperature, blood flow, muscle contraction and spatial data along with 9 channel EEG signals to represent the rhythm and physiological response patterns of embodied thought.
Details on how the participants should prepare and what to bring
They should bring their laptops, headphones and an open mind.
If they don’t already have, they can download:
puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended
processing.org
python.org/downloads
be sure to grab 2.7.11
No prior knowledge required, we’ll go through the set & tech step by step. We believe in open-source tech and open-knowledge sharing without barriers to access. Youth are welcome.
- Heidi Boisvert (USA) is a new media artist, creative technologist, experience designer and writer. She founded and serves as the CEO and Creative Director of the futurePerfect lab , a boutique creative agency that works with non-profits to develop imaginative applications of integrated media and emerging technology. Heidi was formerly the Media Director at Breakthrough where she designed, developed and promoted a range of viral, new media and pop culture campaigns that helped raise awareness and instigate policy change on pressing social issues. She created the first 3D social change game, ICED I Can End Deportation , to shift the frame around unfair U.S. immigration policies. Heidi also designed America 2049 , an alternative reality game on Facebook about pluralism, which was nominated for Games for Change and Katerva Awards. Most recently, she co-founded XTH , an opensource creative biowearable start up, and was named a Harvestworks Creativity + Technology = Enterprise Fellow. She received her PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is currently a Media Impact Fellow at the Harmony Institute. futureperfectlab.com
- Andrew Demirjian is an interdisciplinary artist who creates alternative relationships between image, sound and text that challenge contemporary media conventions. He uses computer programming, surveillance, data sonification and motion tracking to twist perceptual relationships between the senses. The pieces take the form of interactive installations, generative poems, audiovisual performance and single channel videos. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of the Moving Image, Eyebeam, Rush Arts, the White Box gallery, The Newark Museum and many institutions internationally. The MacDowell Colony, Puffin Foundation, Artslink, Harvestworks and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts are among the organizations that have supported his work. He has performed his audiovisual compositions at Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Stone, Monkey Town and played with many celebrated avant-garde jazz musicians including Don Byron, Ray Copeland, Whit Dickey and Rob Brown. Andrew teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Film and Media Department at Hunter College, NY, USA. andrewdemirjian.com