Cybernetic Editors is a system in which there are two editor personalities that are vying for control over the final outcome of an edited social education video. The source video is exchanged between two Max/MSP programs that re-edit snippets of video, making numerous iterative passes. Each pass changes the videos into a blend of the two editing styles of the two cybernetic editors.
Lethe is a video installation in which a loop of Social Education film is manipulated programmatically. The loop features different major events in the lives of the fictional women such as marriage, spousal disagreements, choosing whether to have children or not. These events are manipulated by either delaying video frames, showing repeated actions, or by abstracting the scene such that the figures are shapeless masses of black, white and grey. As the video loops though the scenes, the understanding of the events happening is modified for the viewers, such that two viewers, who saw the loop at different times, would have a different understanding of how they perceived the emotions of events that are happening.
Lethe 2010
Video Installation
This is my team’s pre-submission for the 2009-2010 LVMH/Parsons competition where we created a documentary sample based on puppetry research. Completed with Chien-Pai “Bobby” Lin, Ya-Han Tsui.
An excerpt of a 5 minute documentary on the practice of New York artisan, Michiko Sakano as part of the LVMH x Parsons: Revisitng the Art of Craftsmanship, Artisans New York competition. Exhibited as part of LVMH: Revisiting the Art of Craftsmanship Exhibit at Fashion week 2010 and Monthlong Exhibit on Govenor’s Island.
Director, Editor: Laura Simpson
Collaborating with Andrea Bradshaw, we created an interactive data visualization of the Twitter habits of United States Congressmen.
We used data from the Twitter API, the Sunlight Foundation and the New York Times Congressional API. Using the interface, users could compare attendance at votes, voting with or against party records, according to twitter activity, represented region, party and gender.
Our project was featured on a Swiss data visualization site, +DataVisualization.ch and noticed by Tweet Congress and New York Times Openblog.
I think I miss you is a video that visits the details of greetings and replaying/re-editing of elements of the relationship between the two female figures as they greet, interact and say farewell. The simple act is revisited and edited in camera, distorting the event and refocusing to a dreamlike, almost memory. This video acts as a meta video as the qualities of hi-8 video and dv- tape and the mechanics of the two recording mediums are interplayed with each other.
Cinderella’s Illuminated Gown is a fiber optic/LED/fibre, time-based installation that unravels the interstitial state of transformation and ephemeral nature of Cinderella’s Gown. The project focuses on the role of Cinderella’s gown as a portal between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
2010-2011
Fiber Optics, LEDs, Fibre, Steel Rods
Variable Dimensions
Published:
ACM: Interactions Magazine – Embroidered Confessions
Conference Talks:
Critical Themes in Media 2011
MFA DT Thesis site and symposium
Parsons participated in the 2009 Mozilla Design Challenge with two other universities, all addressing the issue of how to visualize the user’s browser history in a meaningful way.
My solution was the Unique History Timeline.
The Unique History Timeline is focused on
helping the user to remember unique sites that he or she might have visited and uses visual and timeline queues to help refresh their memory.
The Unique History Timeline has the following features:
Scribbling Speech is an organic performance and installation. The artist writes all of her responses to interaction and stimulus in marker on the wall of the performance space, creating historical trails of the experience. Each of the columns are the height of the artist, to keep the footprint of the piece human size.
The Performance took place Feb. 18th 2009 from 10am-6:30pm.
Logically Speaking combines the frustrations, desires, estrangement and fantastic quotidian observations of an artist abroad. These words are paired with logical notation and proofs that resolve easily in comparison.
This is an intervention into a social education film from 1953: “Social Sexual Development in Adolescents.” The original film was available via the Prelinger Archives.
Social Sexual Development in Adolescents – Re-edit
Social Sexual Development in Adolescents: Re-edit from Laura Simpson on Vimeo.
For the fall ’09 iteration of our Design Challenge we work together with students from universities and schools specializing in User Experience and Human-Computer-Interaction studies around the world to find innovative concepts to the question:
“Browsing History — How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?”
Given:
Tasks | Phase 1:
My personal User Story:
“I am a heavy tabbed browser user. Sometimes I have up to 6 separate windows with different subjects organized by window. Often when browsing, it is a mix of regular sites that I visit like gmail or the new york times and new sites that I navigate to from links at the older sites. In reviewing sites that I normally visit and unique sites, it’s difficult for me to go through the history and find how I got to the unique sites because the history tree shows only general information about the frequently viewed sites, and no images that might give me a clue to how I got from one place to another. After enough browsing, I can’t trace back to determine how I navigated to each site or when a tab became a new window.”
Some Survey Questions that I developed for the class survey:
How Quickly can you find what you are looking for?
1-30 secs
30sec-1minute
1minute-2 minutes
2 minutes-10 minutes
Greater than 10 minutes
Never
What are you looking for in the History?
A webpage on a site
A specific Site
Browser state at a specific time
What I was doing at a time
Other[text box]
What web browser history interface do you like best?
Internet Explorer
Safari
Opera
Google Chrome
Other [textbox]
Why?[text]
Tasks | Phase 2:
A selection of some of the ideas that were used in my proposal:
Tasks | Phase 3:
Concept:
Unique Site Visited History Browser
The Low Fidelity Prototype was the first actual fleshing out of the Unique Sites History Browser. I took the integrated History window from Google Chrome and added Mozilla features. This was also the first test of the cached screenshot being linked to unique sites. Firefox already has a feature in the History that counted how many times a user visited a website, but it had to be toggled on. This feature side steps that and has the visit count be an important part of keeping track of Frequently Visited Sites and reducing clutter in the History.