previous projects

Sebastian Llovera Leo
An installation that consists of creating “alive sculptures” by 3d printing artificial intelligence generated objects with a combination of clay and mycelium along with artworks that use slime mold to intervene drawings and mind maps in order to think in an art practice that allows inter species collaboration.
Collin Garnett
A novel concrete fabrication process that uses pulses of compressed air to shape concrete; it does not require mechanical master molds, produces little waste, and is low cost. Conventional panel formwork has limited variation. Complex geometry and surface textures can be implemented into a mold, but each formwork needs to be made individually and is only for one specified configuration. With robotic exhalation, simple formwork can be used repeatedly, with formal variations controlled digitally and implemented in real-time.
John Li, Nehal Jain
Our thesis explores the potential of AI in streamlining city planning, design, and architecture. The chosen site for the project is Mariupol, Ukraine due to its urgent need for reconfiguration and design. The project will involve collaboration between architecture, urban design, AI, and socio-cultural studies The project acts as a prototype tool that can be used in other war-torn areas or areas lacking infrastructure.
Jeffrey Sobieraj
A pairing of visual images of health anxiety behaviors, known as “checking behaviors,” with a musical composition recorded solely from sounds my body produces, allowing the audience to learn about my experience through image, but also, one may experience my story through the sound of my body. It is a horror film of sorts, as I excavate the brutality of the incessant prodding, poking, scratching, and violence one can inflict on oneself to understand oneself.
Sujay Saple
A time-based performative installation that will include an immersive installation/built landscape, a performance inside the installation, and a tactical questionnaire requiring spectators to ‘become performers’ while inside the installation. The project generates dialogues between place and self – probing polemical ideas about who belongs to a place and who a place belongs to.
The goal of this project is to develop a new genre of inclusive augmented reality games and room-sized interactive systems that remove physical and social barriers to play. The project addresses the unmet need of players with different mobility abilities to play and exercise together in spaces such as school gymnasiums, community centers, and family entertainment centers.
Gray Snyder
An interactive audio-visual installation that explores the porous borders between spacial, ecological and social systems. The installation integrates the methods of data visualization, projection, Arduino sensors, and architectural structures developed from mycelium-based biocomposites.
Elle Schwiderson
An interdisciplinary stop-motion film/performance utilizing my skills as both a visual and performance artist to explore how my relationship to family has changed over time in relation to how my gender identity has also changed.
Bianca Trihenea
An art magazine compiled from submissions by students of all majors. Our aim is to deconstruct the typical magazine formalities and create a product more reflective of unfiltered expression. The pages themselves will take the form of collages unbound by margins and captions, instead free forming visual narratives between different artists’ work.
Robin Jiao
A science fiction visual novel game featuring multiple lesbian romance options and an engaging narrative created by StudioDiag, a UMich student-founded independent game development group.
Sin-Yu Deng
A reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s novels Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. This project creates a world that examines artificial intelligence inspired by other projects reimagining the role AI plays in society.
Gray Snyder
An installation that consists of an entropic sculpture, durational video projection and an audio soundscape using sentimental objects and places as unconventional metrics to grasp the incommensurable self. The final sculpture will be an altar created from an assemblage of objects cast into wax, which will then be burned and displayed partially melted. The altar’s remnants will be immersed in a projection documenting the sculpture’s deterioration and a soundscape, both designed to complicate the assumed linearity of time.
Christopher Okomura
A video game that follows a very small band of misfit animals - once left on the side of the road - who come together to found a small, broken-down camp in the middle of a valley. Through character-to-character interactions and an emphasis on making the camp a more and more comfortable place for each other to live, their once meager camp eventually grows into a bustling community where hundreds of animals from all over the world come to live in the place that comes to be known as: “Camp Kaleo”.
Unnatural Nature sensor in plant
Eloysa Zelada
An immersive audio-visual and interactive installation that explores the global issue of climate change. The first section immerses participants on the science of climate change with a sonification of six global climate datasets sourced from NASA's global climate change databases. The second part invites to interact with physical plants, shaping the future evolution of the data through motion capture and touch sensors, exploring the power we have to shape the world around us.
Nikhil Ghosh
Project Drift is the WolverineSoft Studio’s semester-long game development project. Our project is a case study of Hyper Light Drifter, a 2D top down action adventure game. A multidisciplinary team of 30 students, which includes artists, programmers, designers, composers, producers, and marketers, collaborate to build a 30 minute game using Unity. At the end of the semester, the project will be released on itch.io and steam, and will be shown off at the EECS 494 student showcase and at IGDA (International Game Developers Association).
The project provides sounds and color analogs of people who exist across multiple axes of physical, emotional, cultural and social divergent identities. The project considers imputations of combinations of sound, color, and visuals in presenting all data - including potentially very identifiable combinations.
“22/26 Midwest” is a net-zero building concept for the US Midwest climate condition. The technology has the goal to reduce the green-house gas emission for building operation, to improve the comfort of the occupants and to reduce the construction cost. The UARTS Student Team will work on prototypes, programming and control technologies to develop the “22/26 Midwest” project.
This team will enable the architecture student to translate and test spatial ideas in the design process through immersive technologies using point clouds generated from photogrammetry and LiDAR. In addition to scanning and photogrammetry, this team will test design methodologies (experimenting with VFX and VR), create templates for workflow documentation, and establish a database for site scans and student projects.
This team will conduct a collaborative and interdisciplinary study of shadows to expand and hybridize conceptions of shadows, from a range of fields, as a way of mining their artistic potential and imagining their use in experiential and immersive art encounters.
This team will make Korean Art Song (Gagok) more accessible to English speaking students by finding Korean composed song scores, creating English translations, phoneticizations and spoken recordings of song texts, and organizing these materials into an accessible database.
The research project team will create physically and socially intelligent structures that facilitate cooperation and emotional release, while transcending the fixed expectations of architecture and infrastructure, thereby emboldening viewers to become participants.
Em Spencer
This project seeks to challenge the misconceptions regarding self expression, and freedom in art. We will explore creativity in two fields that embody self expression in an unstructured manner, but require intentionality and prehension in the fields of study. The musicians will be featured 'reading a painting', and will then perform a piece that inspires the creation of another painting.
Leah Crosby
A performance, meets radio drama, meets choose-your-own-adventure novel, meets call-in hotline. Using a vintage telephone switchboard and a series of cassette decks, a performer will live-patch an audio drama that unfolds based on the directions of a call-in participant. The narrative draws on ideas of obsessive re-imaginings of alternative choices that could have been made, and weren't.
Sky Christoph
An A/V project of original music and visual materials culminating in a string of live performances. Using MaxMSP, Ableton Live, and live instrumentation, performers will be immersed in a mass of semi-transparent scrim and hanging ropes, upon which videos and images are projected and manipulated in real time with the music.
Zia Zhao
A coming of age animated short film about two boys from opposite sides of the globe, who come together to hunt down a mythical, monstrous white wolf in the Northern American wild. The film is entirely without dialogue, and relies on sound and visuals to tell its story.
Niki Fairchild Azevedo
Will being immersed in what it takes to make your clothing change your relationship to what you buy and how you dispose of fashion? Harnessing the power of VR, follow the creation of a pair of jeans from a cotton farm to your closet. Using Design for Sustainable Behavior, I hope to create a nudge in clothing purchase habits.
Joshua Chapp
A TV drama pilot produced by the FTVM 421 class following temporary manager Josh and the employees of the Jersey Shore restaurant, The Saltwater Summerhouse, as they navigate new positions, new leadership, and new romance. A tale of self-discovery and new beginnings, the Salthouse's beachy charm underscores Josh's struggle with his sexuality and the team's journey to stay unified in the face of change.
Sartorial Symbiosis
Douglas Tsui, Elizabeth Ervin, Gayathri Sivakumar, Maya Fraser
Buildings and clothing are two expressions of the same human need for shelter, housing and holding the body. We will be creating wearables that are able to adapt to the user by responding to emotional, kinetic, and physiological stimuli. These dynamic garments will operate in response to the human body using a combination of experimental materials such as biofilm and technological control components like Arduinos and 3D printed molds.
Tyler Musgrave
An animation project leveraging the narratives of Black women and femmes' experiences with harm, healing, and joy online collected in the CHI 2022 paper, Experiences of Harm, Healing, and Joy among Black Women and Femmes on Social Media.
Adam Schmidt
A multidisciplinary research project with the goal of designing and building a new musical instrument. This research will infuse novel and creative engineering practices with the traditional craftsmanship and musicality involved in instrument design. The Hummellaphone exploits the principles of electromagnetism and mixed-signal processing to dynamically control the sustained vibration of metal tines via a custom haptic interface.
David Minnix
[Re]Wilding is an immersive multimedia installation/performance with 4 interactive spaces that each address themes of technology, community, self, and ecological crisis. Audience members will become immersed through character building, interactive music, dance, and meditation, and asked to engage in speculative exercises that pose questions about our collective future.
Okyoung Noh
Across generations in history, how have been the narrative of Korean female immigrants’ aspirations transmitted into another generation, crossing the borders, from South Korea to the United States? This project will investigate the living narratives such as the dreams and endless daily failures of a liberal-captial society and upward mobility of two Korean American females - a mother and daughter - living in the United States.
Caleb Middleton
A musical titled “Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon”, written by Kirsten Childs performed as a part of the University’s Black History Month Programming.
Caitlyn Bogart
A production of the contemporary song cycle, Songs For a New World, by Jason Robert Brown.
Maddie Vassalo, Marta Frank
A devised theater piece to go on show through Basement Arts which seeks to explore how the media influences how we think and feel and alters our perception while fundamentally changing the world we live in physically and socially.
Chloe Chodorow
An interdisciplinary work that incorporates projections and movement to explore the concept of the self. The animation will be a combination of rotoscoping and digital collage. The dancers will interact with animated versions of themselves on screens and images will be projected on their physical bodies.
This UARTS FEAST project will design, prototype and test an aerospace vehicle to locate and identify endangered plant species in wetland environments. The vehicle should minimally disrupt plant and animal wildlife. Your test client is the University's Botanical Gardens.
1001++ (Magical Technologies) is a series of artistic inquiries inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s 3rd law, “[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This lens allows students on this UARTS FEAST project to re-examine folk narratives not as superstitious but to read the ‘magic’ as culturally aspirational desires of applied technologies (e.g., VR, machine learning, robotics, storytelling, choreography).
This UARTS FEAST project will capture the intricate and fast physical movements required for many percussive techniques in slow motion in order to analyze both the physical conditions and sonic outcomes associated with some of percussion's signature performance demands.
Studio JOY draws upon interventionist art practices and psychologist Victor Frankl's logotherapy as a form of activism in the face of institutional betrayal. Interventionist art practices made in the spirit of culture jamming as defined by Mark Dery: “Groucho Marxists, ever mindful of the fun to be had in the joyful demolition of oppressive ideologies.” Studio JOY will engage in making practices that may include the construction of superhero or mascot costumes, public signage, and/or screenplays.
This UARTS FEAST project, "Picturing the Structure of Musical Spaces," will study and construct visual representations of music using mathematics. Drawing on scholarship that represents musical chords as points in geometric spaces, we will explore new ways of “picturing” these musical spaces by constructing visualizations of their structure, patterns, and symmetries.
To create a healthier and more sustainable future, we need to create ways to make organic food less expensive to produce and thus more accessible to everyone. This UARTS FEAST project will explore ways to use robots to assist with organic farming and gardening tasks and will collaborate with the U-M Campus Farm and feature working with a real robot to perform tasks related to agriculture.
Jane Prophet
Developing a prototype for a new large-scale art installation using laser-cut paper and video projection mapping inspired by the plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, described as the “lab rat among plants.” Students from Stamps and Bioscience will create a pilot study, or smaller-scale version, of what will eventually be a room-sized installation of plant forms cut from paper, lit using video projection from 5 projectors.
Pheiv Kurtz
A (work in progress) installation about the mind during isolation, as represented through a Zoom meeting with myself. More specifically, four parts of myself, representative of a hypothetical Four Horsemen of Quarantine.
Blueprint Literary Magazine
Blueprint Literary Magazine is a student-produced literary magazine at the U-M. We annually publish original writing and art from across the Ann Arbor community, including poetry, fiction, photography and art. Our mission at Blueprint is to promote artistic diversity and foster creative expression.
Michigan Seismic
Engineering and architecture students in Michigan Seismic collaborate to design, analyze, and construct a balsa wood structure to compete in an international collegiate competition hosted by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI). Along with a physical construction, the team must present an architectural rendering of the design and a 3D model in SAP2000.
Kendell Miller-Roberts
A qualitative design research project on how to integrate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) topics into undergraduate engineering education at the University of Michigan and prototyping and developing an interactive card deck for engineering educators to better help them integrate DEI topics into their classes.
Julie Chen
An experimental mini-opera in three acts, seeks to explore how collaboration between architecture, performance, and engineering can stimulate an understanding of systems in the built environment typically left unseen. To tell the story of hidden hygienic systems and their environmental impact, the project repositioned the residential bathrooms as a scenographic. In this scenario, plumbing pipes are reimagined as instruments, hardware as props, and wet walls are refashioned into sets.
Sasha Yakovenko
A concert featuring works from six graduating seniors in the Dance department, each of whom are presenting a solo and a group piece.
Maggie Wiebe
This soft sculpture is a scale model replica of the sun facing side of the magnetosphere. This stuffed model mimics the way the Earth's magnetic field cushions the Earth from the solar wind, and the way it contracts and re-expands in response to pressure, similar to a pillow.
Natalia Rocafuerte
Using dreams recorded from the DREAM HOTLINE, the Dream Machine Archive is a vinyl pressing of immigrant and first generation dreams. Including DACA Dreamers, Immigrants from Mexico and first generation dreams.
Spencer Harris
PAT 413 students engage in legendary local music scene by composing, recording, and pressing Techno compositions.
Timmy Thompson
In this narrative satire on mental health, Ellie and Chaim are college juniors with big plans for the future. But their aspirations might prove hollow as the disillusionment of growing up and discovering the true nature of the world around them sets in.
Vishnupriya Napa Ravikumar
A game-like interface designed for urban designers, urban planners, or anyone interested in urbanism to make decisions about cities. Confidential testing and research is currently underway and will be shared as it develops.
Lydia Dunn
A dance concert in which each student choreographer will present choreographic work that creates an escape from reality into a world of fantasy that is welcomed following the many struggles of the past few years.
Jessica Burkle
A piece that combines experimental dance practices with endurance performance art, coupled with a garment, to explore the intersection of beauty and pain and the trauma of living with it. Each day of the performance, the garment will be destroyed and broken out of, and then repaired. I look to explore the ownership of one's beauty and the ways in which I can take control of the ways in which I create vulnerability on the body through performance and clothing.
Nicole Denise White
A one woman experimental film about the loss of Niki’s father to suicide. Through a multimedia collage of 10 chapters, Disrupted navigates Niki’s coming-of-age while remembering and retelling her father’s story. Fighting against the romanticization and villainization of suicide, the piece aims to connect to the universal human experience and ideology that life is worth living.
Charlotte B. Um
A cinematic dance piece, which highlights the intersectionality of movement and poetry in order to reflect the human condition in a raw, genuine, heart-touching way. In this original piece, we will grapple with depression, anxiety and how that affects body image and distorted eating through the lens of a male and female relationship.
Kaitlyn Tom
Pulitzer and Tony winning rock musical centering around a mother who struggles with bipolar disorder and the effects that managing her illness has on her family. Our production of Next to Normal intends to explore the story of a family struggling with mental illness and grief through the lens of the Asian American family experience.
Mirit Skeen
A one-act horror play that weaves an uncomfortable and gruesome story of three young queer people wrestling with each other and their future in a not-too-distant world crumbling under a climate catastrophe. It is written and directed by two transgender U-M students.
Manali Desai
An exploration of e-textiles as a flexible barrier and mediator in play and bonding between people. I'll be creating a 3x6ft double-sided interactive tapestry on rollers so it's an infinite flexible interface between the both sides. Using conductive embroidery there will be interactive elements linked to sound on both to facilitate collaborative composition and area's of alignment that provide new modes of bonding.
Students posing with bananas
Oliver Shapton
A public art installation that aims to bring awareness to mental health and bring individuals closer together. Two "banana phones" will be placed in public, each with a prompt assigned to it. One focused on positive responses and feedback, the other on personal struggles and tougher subjects. Recordings will be relayed back onto the phones in the second phase of the project.
MedLaunch
Many parents with mobility-related disabilities have a limited ability to carry their child. This team is developing a novel device that allows parents to push their child from room to room, enabling more independence in their care of the child.
Ariana Shaw
“Rave For One” will be housed in a box truck and transported to different areas near campus. This project will create a space to address the escapism of generation Z and millennials in a time of high stress, and make a productive space to both escape into and reflect on our own wonderment through the live arts. The space will be a colorful, vibrant, psychedelic dreamworld inside with customized bead curtains, concert lights, projections, sensory experiences (kaleidoscopes and textured walls), EDM music and take-aways for the audience to create a visual and multi-sensual experience.
Georgia b. Smith
An architectural diorama with a number of miniature robots programmed to perform and interact as protagonists within this diorama. The robots will be engineered to have a variety of actions – some will inflate, emit light, vibrate or walk - reflecting and commenting on how we process and examine information as a society, particularly how we filter and respond to media.
Mikayla Buford
A game design workshop series with high school students at the Neutral Zone, a youth-led organization in Ann Arbor, with the aim to teach participants how to work collaboratively using an integrative design process, and confidently discuss and recognize issues of power and discrimination in digital spaces using frameworks from Black feminist thought.
Ellie Schmidt
Experimental film and visual arts installation - a collaborative, improvisational, meditative approach to the soundtrack will heighten the aesthetic and conceptual impact of the film.
Samuel Uribe-Botero
Enhancing live music shows by creating interactive audiovisuals. These visuals lie at the intersection of coding, design, and audio production. We have already incorporated these visuals into a show with renowned DJ Shigeto.
Kristina Sheufelt
An installation of kinetic landscape sculptures responding to physiological data. Each sculpture processes data from a different bodily interaction with land by way of biosensing equipment such as electroencephalogram (EEG) and creative robotics.
Adam Schmidt
A series of projects involving the electromagnetic excitation and sustaining of metallic strings for creating music and art: Polyphonic Guitar Sustainer, GuitArt, and String Synthesizer.
Juliet Schlefer
A larger-than-life sized robot (approximately 7' tall) to personify and personalize aspects of music that are often looked over, most specifically accompaniment. The robot will "sing" the part for electronics, giving a face to that part of the music, and turning the piece into a duet or conversation instead of maintaining the relationship of soloist and accompanist.
McKenna Sabon
Rouge Park: DAS Initiative (diversity, accessibility, stewardship) is designing an interactive web-based map of the Detroit urban park Rouge Park featuring information on the history, stories, amenities, and events in the park, and designed in a way that is and readable to all users.
Jenna John
Erotic Ecologies is an interdisciplinary and multifaceted art project involving a hole and ecological study of soil, plant communities, and animal inhabitants in a 15 by 15 meter plot of oak-hickory ecosystem at Saginaw Forest. The project will accumulate in a body of work collected from the field, including recorded performances, photographs, and a field journal, and a series of paintings made in collaboration with the site that commemorate this process, unfolding relationship, and erotic discoveries.
Connor Flanigan
A 2-person play about the famous abstract painter, Mark Rothko, and the testing of his artistic value system that is interrogated by his apprentice as they work on a commissioned work for the Four Seasons in the late '50s. The core experiential element we will be adding is tapping into the vibrations on the canvas as it's painted on throughout the play and using that feedback to adjust to music and lighting on the set.
Sky Christoph
“O Great Mullein!” is a choreographed performance depicting the life cycle of Great Mullein (verbascum thapsus) in which five performers interact with a soft sculpture of the plant. An electroacoustic score involving audio manipulation of the sounds of plant material, cello, vibraphone, and spoken word accompany the movement.
Nick Warren
Lithorgan is a project to utilize cutting-edge digital fabrication technology in the design of a Hammond-style tonewheel organ. To achieve this, an organ with 3D printable tonewheels will be designed. This novel instrument will maintain the beautiful imperfections inherent in the electromechanical nature of the design, while adding customizability through the ability to interchange tonewheels with different, even experimental, waveforms.
B Pearsall
Holey and Rotten emerges from an archive of 900 property appraisals in Richmond, VA that my family owned in the 1900s. Most were slums. With this archive, I want to make visible the role white property ownership played in urban renewal, aiding in the displacement of thousands of people in predominantly black neighborhoods. Using my particular connection to this past to consider new forms of reparative work, I propose an alternative to archival possession through an accessible, digital story map.
MIsha Korolev
A sitcom about college students from various backgrounds. We will produce the first episode during the Fall semester, which will be about about 20 minutes long.
Leah O'Donnell
Fully immersed in the landscape of Lake Huron, this dance-art film acts as a moving painting intertwined with playful, poignant, and surreal stories about humans and the natural world. Domestic objects are introduced to sand and water, dancers embody multiple species, and the absurdity, beauty, and clash of human kind on Earth emerge through dancing metaphor.
Andrew Otchere
Branch Out is a comedic-thriller centered around what happens when three African American students find themselves at a rambunctious house party where a police officer shows up to shut everything down. Aware of how the consequences for them may differ from their predominantly white peers, they diverge from the scene of the party and hide in the basement. The story concludes with a twist that is sure to leave every audience member speechless.
Taylor Kelly
A short film about unethical food marketing toward communities of color and low income and food related disease. I am demonstrating these issues through the story of my grandmother who has lived in Chicago all her life and is currently suffering from Alzheimers which, in part, is from her diet.
Jason Zhang
Counterpoint Checker is a web-based app that would automatically grade counterpoint homework. (Species 1-5) This app will help to alleviate the workload of music theory teachers and professors as well as make the study of Western classical melodic and harmonic concepts more accessible.
Grace Ma
Using LEDs and fiber optic fabric, Glowing Garments is an interactive outfit that reacts to sound and motion in real time. Intended for dancing, this mask and skirt promises to augment a user's performance.
Isaac Bromley-Dulfano
This project is a bottom-up exploration of robotic drawing, algorithms, and design. A flexible interface for Fern to interact with other machines, sensors, observers, and artworks will be provided and will engage other artists and engineers to explore conceptual design algorithms and collaborative art pieces for Fern.
Matias del Campo
This project has embarked on creating large-scale repositories that contain annotated plans and house 3D models that would allow everyone to interrogate design based on high-quality datasets.
Collaborators and conspirators will explore the structure, philosophy and dance of multiple forms of language, to define language and its use in multiple ways, to discover how it can be activated, (de)constructed and deciphered in relationship to effort, shape, time and space.
ORBIT stands for the Online Resource for Building Intercultural Teams—and it’s one of many projects underway in the ORBIT Lab! We’re also developing a tool for middle schoolers to team up on social justice issues, working on a book called Creative Resilience, and collaborating with faculty in pharmacy and cardiology on an interactive dashboard to help providers better care for heart failure patients.
The SparkVotes Parties project is a series of games designed to educate and energize college-age voters. Our collaborative team will be developing imaginative ways to gamify the skills and knowledge needed for campus civic participation in the 2022 election.
Rebekah Modrak
UnProductive Solutions is an artwork that will collectively imagine a technological world with a soul. UnProductiveSolutions will be structured as an umbrella “company” developing services that mimic, disrupt, and challenge current uses and assumptions associated with existing technologies.
Dawn Gilpin
Development of tools enabling methods of spatial investigation in design and presentation using immersive technologies. The tutorials, workflows, and app development enable conceptual extensions of foundational techniques for students in triangulation, drawing, and modeling.
Lars Junghans
DomusSol, is a new building standard that has the goal to combine affordability and sustainability for net-zero buildings in the US.
Áine Heneghan
This project uses computational tools to analyze the jigs collected (1) by James Goodman in south-west Ireland during the 1860s and (2) by Stephen Grier in north-west Ireland during the 1880s. It further considers the question of regional differentiation, which is analogous to dialects of a language.
Anthony Vanky
[Smile.], is a research project that seeks to make transparent artificial intelligence technologies. We ask in what ways and for whom are these algorithms (in-)accurate? Specifically, [Smile.] is an interactive installation that uses computer vision to measure human affect.
Julien Malherbe
Superior’s Song is a musical piece derived entirely from data about Lake Superior. Using the programming language Python, I created a program that converts data from four measured environmental factors into coherent musical tracks.
Emily Smith
Plastic Abodes will be a multimedia artwork drawing on dance, sculpture, and film to explore the permeable membrane between the natural and unnatural.
Gary Zhang
This project looks at ways architecture might play a role in restoration ecology and addresses the inequities caused by urban development in ground dwelling organisms through a collection of digital images of speculative habitats and the physical production of a “seed quilt” that will regraft native Michigan flora onto the landscape as a form of land art.
Dani Canan, Dee Vibhatasilpin, Elijah Underhill-Miller, Lauren Strawn, Rachel Goodin
For our project we were given the theme Revolve. Our take on this was to each come up with a survey to pass to another group member to question them more about their interior life, to see what they ‘revolve’ around. Using those responses, we each attempted to exemplify the ideas and data through song.
Alan Yang, Anna Gaishin, Dani Tutak, Harrison Biggs, Joshua Sum, Madison Forstner
We have chosen to interpret our theme, “Redistribute,” as taking parts of one object and spreading them around. By incorporating each constituent part into something new (in this case a resin cast object), not only do we return value to the object, but we also allow that value to exist in multiple forms to multiple people.
John Marinan, Lucy Kaffenbarger, Maggie Xiang, Peninnah Posey, Zan Huang
Based on the word “reform,” our project consists of five books, each one reformed by a corresponding member of our team. Each person was free to take their subproject whatever direction they chose, whether it be a sculpture, book folding, or other manipulation. We treated this project as a learning experience about the creative processes within others and that within ourselves.
Daniel Cho, Lauryn Leuenberger, Lili Omilian, Min Hermon, Pranjal Sharma
The project takes materials that we would throw away, discard, or give little thought to after its purpose has been fulfilled and reforms them into a sort of sculpture.
Charles Bolocan, Eric Oliveira, Megan Klein, Molly Gaffey, Terry Li
Our presentation is the culmination of research and experimentation surrounding the use of water in our lives. Though it is such a valuable resource, our team began this process completely unaware of how much we used on a day-to-day basis. Thus, we decided to track our water usage with both normal and conservative habits.
Isabella Wood, Kendra Kleber, Kim Nguyen
We have created a digital rock collection. Because of the online format of this year, we chose to make a digital project so the audience could interact with each piece. There is a main slide showing the collection of all pieces, and from there, the viewer is able to select a rock to view in more detail, alongside its story.
Lahana Maija, Luke Lee, Nandita Gupta, Ted Ivanac III
An animation that changed art styles so that we could each display our different styles.
Adam Lenhart, Alyssa Wilcome, Hannah Powell, Joseph McGuire, Josh Dukes, Pedro Fonseca, Samuel Russel, Sarah Gery, Taylor Splingaire
Word art to visually depict a subject that they thought was remarkable. Our approaches were somewhat varied: some of us used Photoshop or another software to overlay text on top of an image, while others opted to hand-draw or paint it. Each image is made out of our own words, either in the form of a story, or multiple key words/phrases. In this way, each image is composed of what makes it meaningful or significant to us.
Alex Burgaud, Kaitlyn Onela, Katie Ballard, Kevin Ji, Ries Plescher, Sarah Multer
A web comic depicting how intertwined everything that we are trying to reform is within our society. It functions like a choose your own adventure story, where the choices you make affect the outcome of the story line and the world around you. We made this with Google websites where we were able to use some of our programming skills and art skills to combine different things and get the website to work how we wanted it to.
Jack Morin, Jennifer Gao, Katja Ampe, Matthew Priskorn
A game functioning pretty much the same as a usual chess, except that we play it on the inner sides of a 7x7x7 cube. There are four blocks on four sides indicating in white and black in the game and the pieces cannot go through it. We have provided two options for players, an online option as well as an offline option, you can enjoy the game either with a friend beside you or playing online.
Abigail Seguin, Alexander Constantino, Alliyiah Torrey, Christina Sheckler, Emily Yi, Matthew Eggers, Zaynab Alsaedy
A short video that allows the audience to witness the day of strangers around the world using Google Street View. Based on the term “revolve”, the video highlights that even though an individual’s life may differ from another across the globe, we are more similar than different. We all breathe, eat, and walk under the same sky.
Brandon Mack, Meera Kumar, Sajjad Ali Khan, Sean Thursby
A website that showcases a compilation of parts of a story submitted by survey participants. Participants were asked to write one of five parts of the generic story structure without context of the other parts.
Tate Fisher
A multimedia piece that explores what happens to the things we build after their creators are gone; is what we make destroyed along with us, or do fragments of it remain? Based off of the ancient city of Pompeii, VIIXIX goes through four movements describing the city’s history- the morning of Mt. Vesuvius’ eruption, the few hours beforehand, the centuries after, and the city’s eventual rediscovery. Each section is presented alongside an array of light with colors representing the timbre of the sound. Written by Tate Fisher (CoE) as part of the Thompson Prize.
Angela M. Schöpke Gonzalez
This project explores how scores and improvisation can support Information researchers’ work as results presentation methods. In a study that I conducted, I found that scores and improv can support researchers in engaging critical reflection about their positionalities and roles in shaping research outcomes. I plan to re-engage with participants to develop a score and improvisation-based presentation of our results, offering Information researchers insights about how these methods can help us share knowledge.
Nathan Byrne
This immersive installation is an architectural structure surrounded by a labyrinth. There is an ambients core emitting from a directional speaker within this enclosure. The dimly lit interior is activated by a slowly pulsing light source and sculptural elements. There is an artist book in the room which contains poetry printed on white paper with white ink, the text is visible with the aid of a UV light affixed to the book’s stand.
Zia Zhao
TBD
Kaitlyn Tom
What does it mean to be “at home”? Is it a place? A person? A thing? A feeling? Perhaps for BIPOC, the concept of “home” is wrapped in a multitude of emotions and history. HOME is a filmed cabaret that encourages BIPOC students at the U-M to describe the feeling of being ‘home’ to them through performative art. Through this, we hope to nurture a collaborative environment in which students from diverse races, ethnicities, and schools can use art to better understand what "home" means to them.
Naveen Sabharwal
The Michigan Animation Club provides students with the skills and portfolio pieces to make them competitive in the entertainment industry. During the semester, our members will be participating in a group project that walks them through the full process of storyboarding, character design, key animation, background animation, and compositing.
Waylon Richmond
A set of ‘smart’ analog interventions that address the rapidly evolving ‘smart city’. The project engages in the fields of architecture, design, art, IT, behavior science, and mechanical engineering. Are we free to choose what we put our energy into? Are we aware if and when our energy is being manipulated? How do we flex power over unseen energy harvesters?
Amber Renton
Project Cloud is WolverineSoft Studio's semester-long project. Around 30 students from a variety of disciplines work together to create a video game using Unity. This project goes through several stages of iteration, where members are put on tight deadlines to complete work and receive feedback. At the end of the semester, the project will be shown off at the EECS 494 student showcase and at IGDA (International Game Developers Association) and will remain as a portfolio piece for all of those involved. This semester, we're doing a case study of the games Deep Rock Galactic and Dead Cells, where we'll recreate many of the games’ mechanics while coming up with our own theme and narrative.
Stephanie Prestage
The Blue Note Vocal Jazz Ensemble is putting together a thirty-minute film inspired by the 20-60s songbook movie musical period with the storyline told entirely through vocal jazz arrangements, incorporating a cappella, piano, bass, drums, narration, and dance. We desire to bring the show to audiences in the comfort of their own homes, to be enjoyed as a film presentation of a storyline connected by songs.
Samuel Dunlap
This collaborative, multi-media art project addresses environmental issues in Wyoming. A group of six artists, who all have an interest in creative engagement with the natural world, will find creative ways to experience, express, and spread awareness about the extensive coal mining and forest fires there.
Christine Bruening
This project will investigate the dissemination and reception of digitally rendered artwork created and disbursed within the context of COVID restrictions through a series of outreach surveys and interviews. The project will be self-reflexive, and the interviews and survey results will become a part of the original project itself.
Jordyn Axelrod
Hopelessly Yellow is a blog and social media duo that includes relatable, thought-provoking articles, art, and music all composed by undergraduate U-M students. Rather than devoting content to one area of interest, such as fashion, food, or current events, contributors are instead able to explore a variety of territories. In a world with so much hopelessness, we want to highlight the Hopelessly Yellow times – the small moments that make you excited and grateful to be alive.
Valerie Le
Skating Tree Town is a publication that chronicles Ann Arbor's rich skateboarding history and culture. Using visual design, photography, interviews, and historical archives, this book attempts to synthesize Ann Arbor skate culture and its community in a tangible way for skaters and readers to enjoy.
Albert Che
Project Mural Town is a virtual exhibition that features works from artists all around the world to present a space that promotes creativity and imagination without limitations or boundaries.
Shiqing (Licia) He
By designing, developing, and evaluating GDTs that support the design of three distinct types of craft, my dissertation investigates this novel framework for building design-aid tools.
Joe Soonthornsawad
I seek to shape an artistic process that will help me understand the experiences of and co-create a video piece with Turkers. Through this collaboration, it is my goal to amplify the human stories of crowdwork and explore the relationship between human labor and technological progress.
Griffin Candey
A collaboration with Griffin Candey (composer,) Drew Hosler (saxophone,) and a video artist from STAMPS to create a new multimedia work to be performed and recorded in the Duderstadt Center.
Ellie Schmidt
An artistic collaboration exchanging hand-written water letters (poems, dream diaries, and essays) will expand creating a zine, installations, and a call and response film as process-oriented work inviting the public to reflect on their own memories of water.
Levana Wang
Emotional Creature tells the story of young girls around the world growing into their adolescence. It brings light to the struggles that teenage girls undergo. It strives to seek change and right the wrongs that have been imposed on young girls.
Brian Pekar
The Ann Arbor Public Wifi Collective addresses the growing disparity and urgency in internet access that has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Targeting lower income and disadvantaged areas, the project builds off of the existing local transit infrastructure to optimize and give new agency to a public service preparing for new use conditions.
Rey Jeong
My project involves inviting community members to critically engage in uncomfortable yet necessary dialogue about racial identity. I am outfitting an electioneering truck, inspired by those frequently seen during the Korean election season, as a platform to share narratives through voices of POC. Screens attached to the vehicle will broadcast a series of films called, Cascade Voices. I will invite the public to share experiences of marginalization or to respond to the questions posed in the films.
Megan Finley
Fire Follies focuses on re-designing and re-constructing structures to be more forest fire resistant. We are interested in studying cases of building destruction through forest fires to develop new construction systems and techniques which can be more durable, resilient, and environmentally conscious.
Varun Jindal
We are battling Zoom isolation by creating a better way for students to communicate and interact in school. We began with giving students a study group in their class. Then connected students with the rest of their class via group chat. Now we want to create an app that facilitates more connection between students in this isolating time.
Tal Kamin
We Are Queens is a non-profit female empowerment organization committed to fostering a groundbreaking future through the arts. We are excited to continue growing, creating, and empowering via our next Music Video focused on raising awareness for mental health through the arts.
Najwat Rehman
Leveraging speculative critical design to facilitate evidence-based policymaking to address climate change-induced food security vulnerabilities in Pakistan. An interactive website that translates research and projections about Pakistan's climate change-related food security vulnerabilities into local, visual and relatable future scenarios using speculative critical design methods.
David Sohn
Project Rogue is WolverineSoft Studio's semester-long project. This semester, a student team of around 25 programmers, designers, and musicians, are developing a game based on the post-apocalyptic rogue-like top-down shooter, "Nuclear Throne".
Maggie Roback
A film documenting the once vibrant local music scene of a small town in Southeast Michigan while investigating why it virtually disappeared.
Madison Caldwell
Cheers, is an interdisciplinary group of students on campus who are fighting for digital accessibility for older adults. This team is creating a website extension that will transform the digital experience for older adults and will redesign Gmail and Zoom, making them applications that are more user-friendly and accessible.
Alex Vernon, Megan Finley, Sydney Gembka
“Yes, And...” explored the intersection of architecture and performance in an attempt to understand the interconnectedness of each discipline. The end result paved the way for a larger concept - a website that hosts live performances across many disciplines.
Colin Cusimano, Francesca Romano, Haley Mayes, Jacob Ward, Ryan Cox
Virtual Venues aims to restore the unique setting of live performance to the digital realm by emphasizing what usually fades into the background: the venue. While the magic of sharing a space with noise, artists, and a sea of fellow fans can never be replaced, digitally, we can bring to the forefront the place where the magic happens.
Aislinn Bailie, Akari Komura, Christine Darragh, Hannah Kirkpatrick, Hannah Marcus, Karina Tirado, Sheena Hui, Waylon Richmond
The project aims to amplify the placeness of physical spaces and local voices by using a digital platform. Live streaming the performances enables new spatial relations between neighbors and widens engagement.
Catherine Kenzie, Jamie Johnson, Kaya Ramirez, Nick Warren
Shmood.Studio is a platform for virtual artistic collaboration and performance that attempts to take advantage of both the benefits and downfalls of current technologies to create an immersive user experience that is completely separate from the physical world.
Austin Ehrhardt, Logan Gare, Rosa Manzo, Zoe Faylor
Patch/Work is an open-source resource for (non)performers seeking to repurpose quotidian environments into low-budget spaces for sonic production.
Celia Olsen, Elyssa Bakker, Jenna Moon
Our project uses a hybrid of real-time performance and AR experience to create a new ritual memorializing the lives lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gabriel Guerra, Joseph Mutone, Senhao Wang, Yangtian Yan
A translatable library of visual elements and sonic patterns, musicians and architects can communicate in their own comfort zone and design a digital space together.
Liyah George, Mytreyi Chandrasekhar Metta, Shraddha Jain, Sophia Janevic
Our video depicts one of the many paths an audience member might take on their unique journey through the nodes. The performance featured is “She-e-e-e-e” by SMTD student Megan Rohrer, performed with her group Converge Quartet.
Laida Aguirre
This multidisciplinary symposium / performance attempts to respond to the questions.... What if we make no new things? What models of material circulation can designers engage that don't rely on producing new objects/buildings?
Somangshu Mukherji
This project develops computational techniques for realizing the inner (alto and tenor) parts, from the given bass and soprano parts, for the 4-part chorales by Georg Philipp Telemann demonstrating how composers write 4-part chorales, thus providing a window into musical creativity.
Hannah Smotrich, Stephanie Rowden
This project will develop and test the impact of a COVID-safe creative intervention to educate students and encourage participation in the 2020 election producing an analog and digital “Voting Party in a Box” — a college-voting-specific kit that allows students to gather in small, COVID-appropriate groups to learn about and celebrate voting.
Osman Khan
1001++ (Magical Technologies) revisits the magical and fantastical found in folktales from South Asia, the Middle East, and other Muslim and immigrant traditions as inspiration for the development of a new body of video, performative sculptures, and interactive installations.
Catie Newell
Co-optics seeks to scientifically and artfully deploy design information and digital fabrication, revealing unexpected moments of glow, obscurity, or color shifts, made possible through a robust and shared integrative physical and computational platform.
Maite Iribarren
Physical manifestation of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The product is a playful and mystical, yet tangible impression of a CME. The Space Noise sculpture is composed of a main volume on stands that precisely position the volume just above eye level.
Maite Iribarren
Landscape of a CME is produced through triangulations of data and scientific metadata into visual form language.
John Roselli, Rachel London
TBD
Natsume Ono
"a growing hug" examines the movement of growth and its ability to connect and unite individuals.
Anna Brooks, Joe Iovino
This project was inspired by paper-cut animations in NYT Op-Docs' Animated Life series, as well as the music of Andrew Bird, amongst other things, for their artistic interpretation of scientific concepts and the history surrounding them and created following and Art/Sci Residency with Professor Mark Moldwin's Climate Space Science Lab.
Amanda Kalbuadi
Through this art piece, I try to express how lucky we are that in the chaotic mess where anything and everything can go wrong, everything seems to be in place and order. We have people who dedicate their entire lives to researching about magnetometers that can help us understand the structure of the Earth’s magnetosphere (for educational purposes or to help us detect events before they occur) and even alternatives of living in a different planet just in case Earth is not safe anymore.
Conner Darling, Sindhu Giri
As an artist in resident at the Space Research Center, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, I’m specifically working within the NASA funded Magnetometer Lab. I’m collaborating with my fellow resident artist—a percussionist—to develop an immersive environment within a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). We want to introduce an experiential narrative of a geomagnetic storm so that it can be understood beyond a purely scientific perspective.
Heidi Liu
Two concept cars that will demonstrate the importance of combining future technology and exterior transportation design for efficient, accessible forms of mobility in consultation with MCity, student engineers, and professionals in the auto industry.
Joe Iovino
For my Integrative Senior Thesis Project, I will create new plaques to temporarily accompany plaques around Ann Arbor, in order to call attention to them and put them in context.
Anna Urso, Bruna IunesSanches, Erica Gardner
Microbial Masterpieces is a continuously evolving project devoted to helping people understand the importance of the microbial world, conceived in response to Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change, by Cavicchioli et al. We are funded by the Experiments in Translation Grant.
The student team will explore current participatory design theory and practices toward ideation/ fabrication/production, and test developed pieces that will move forward our understanding and application of participatory design.
The project is called LuCelegans (Luce: light in latin; Light-up C. elegans), or the Interactive Worm Project. It is about building the first interactive, physical, 3-dimensional prototype of C. elegans nervous system through the efforts of a student research team.
The goal of this project is to explore methods of incorporating visual communication of effort, gesture, and movement into telematic performance without video transmission. Practical experiments with different sensing techniques, including infrared motion capture, inertial measurement, electromyography, and force sensing will be coupled with novel digitally fabricated mechatronic displays.
Anya Sirota
ARCH 672 is an interdisciplinary course that explores the intersection of art, architecture and urban development in Mexico City’s socio-economically marginalized neighborhoods.
Michael Gurevich, Sile O'Modhrain
Engineering Applications of Media Technology, focuses on examining how existing and emerging technical resources can be co-opted as part of the process of performing interactive art.
Clare Croft
Damon Locks will attend the class and give hands-on instruction in his turntable methods, discussing how he works to “queer” (undermine the gendered assumptions) about dj-ing.
Robin Brewer
We hosted our annual retreat for the MISC seminar series.
David Bloom
Carol Lempert is uniquely suited to present a customized Innovation Change Agent Workshop for SI-663, combining elements of theater, operations, and social-psychology.
Amy Chavasse
This is a working examination of processes by which ideas emerge and are given body/shape/life in movement and physical expression; In this course, we will investigate, practice and analyze methods for gaining proficiency in contemporary partnering through improvisation.
Endi Poskovic
In this course, students explore paper making applying Japanese and East-Asian methods. Individual and group projects explore both traditional and experimental production of Japanese paper (Washi) from the long inner fibers of tree plants, the application of rice starch paste (Nori) as the vehicle in 3D-construction, engineering, art-making, book-binding, and hand-rubbing pigments with a Japanese baren from inked surfaces of timber plywood (Shina) to produce water color woodcut prints (Moku-hanga).
Christianne Myers
Using BioArtography as a source of inspiration, I wish to re-skill with new resources in order to teach them to students in the future.
Eleni Gourgou
The first 3D interactive C. elegans nervous system prototype Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) nematode, broadly used worldwide in experimental biology, is the only organism of which the entire connectome is fully mapped.
Sophia Brueckner
An interdisciplinary team bridging art/design and engineering will investigate and review available IoT technologies for the purpose of building speculative, functional wearables and IoT prototypes.
Jacob Comerci, Tiffany Ng
As architecture and music faculty, we are developing a week-long interdisciplinary workshop that brings carillon students (from SMTD, LSA, and CoE) and architecture students together.
Charli Brissey
This interdisciplinary symposium will bring together renowned artists and scholars across the fields of dance, science and technology studies, and women’s studies who are currently working at the intersections of performance, art, and ecology.
Susan Funkenstein
Subvention, image reproductions, copyrights, translator, and indexer for a book, scheduled for publication by the University of Michigan Press in Summer 2020.
Stephen Rush
Prototype multimedia installation–part science, part music, part art–that captures an ongoing and precarious transition in the history of our planet: anthropogenic climate change.
Rowan Renee
“Love Letters” is an exhibition of text-based art works that explore intersections of gender, sexuality and misogyny in three archives of correspondence with incarcerated individuals: Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Russell Smith (a prison reform activist against the sexual assault of gay inmates), and my father’s letters to me.
Laura Magnusson
This research/creation program supports a visual thesis, a video testimonial, that includes underwater fieldwork in Cozumel, Mexico to record sound and capture video, the creation of a stop motion animation sequence, and partial post-production of the final work.
Calvin Montana-Macedo
The project’s purpose is to provide evidence about the effectiveness of art-based intervention with youth with a chronic illness.
Kirandeep Bhumber
This project proposes the development of Phulkari, an interactive multimedia performance involving textiles, dance, music and visualizations.
Matias Vilaplana
Synthetic Bodies Technology is constantly shaping the ways we interact and communicate.
Jeff Siegfried
Our project aims to utilize a richly interdisciplinary methodology to generate new ideas and a unique, musical-spatial performance.
Christopher Karounos
10 Degrees is a game that imbues scientific literacy about reforestation and climate change.
Alaa Algargoosh, Babak Soleimani
The emotional impact of Aural Architecture Architectural acoustics is the science that deals with sound inside buildings, and many researchers argue that the physical measurements of architectural acoustics do not precisely reflect the human aural experience.
Taru
Market women are a major socio-economic force in Ghana – they run the bustling marketplaces and are the primary drivers of the informal economy.
Kaylee Tucker, Leonard Bopp, Tyler Gaeth
Despite significant experiential differences between music and architecture, we believe a shared vocabulary between the disciplines is both possible and important.
Mario Vircha
Migrare, an interdisciplinary and international dance and videography performance project.
Melissa Coppola
Lights in the Sky: a [perspective] production [perspective] is a conceptual concert series that re-envisions the time-honored art form of the piano recital into an immersive, multi-sensory experience.
Megan Rohrer
The Infinite Detail of this Place & Time is an immersive multimedia project of improvised music, live video, and audience participation.
Brandon Patterson
Our project centers on creating a children’s book that, through an illustrated story themed around the research topics of two engineering graduate students, will engaging children’s imaginations and curiosity to excite them about science.
Omid Torghabehi
The Cadenza is a prefabricated performance space, coupled with a digital platform.
Alireza Seyedahmadian
The Alzheimer Project is an interactive installation with the purpose of creating an atmospheric experience for creating empathy and awareness towards Alzheimer patients.
Gideon Schwartzman
This research proposal aims to chronologically depict a century of conflict, from 1915-2015, through the interdisciplinary lens of history, art, urban planning, and the primary focus of architecture.
Jonathan Hanna
Design Forum: Walls of Inclusion Competition an interdisciplinary design competition that attempts to make evident the effects of ethics and politics on design practice, to be followed by an exhibition of the winning work and a publication to document the event.
Carolyn Gennari
Inspired by the arctic voyages of Captain William Parry from 1819-1826, this collaboration with students and faculty at the University of Michigan will develop a performance that reflects the layered history of the arctic from the time of 19th century exploration to current anxieties facing the region today.
Alisa Yang, Chelsea Tinsler
This project seeks to realize Andy Akiho’s musical composition, Stop Speaking for solo snare drum and digital playback, through a combination of live performance and a newly crafted fixed mixed media presentation.
Jon Verney
By synthesizing traditional darkroom processes with environmental science, I have formulated a means of redeveloping and chemically toning black and white silver gelatin prints in sulphuric geothermal waters.
Justine Smith
History, is a multimedia installation combining items like a beautiful barrel chair that is being thrown away as my family is beginning to move off the farm that has been in the family for generations, and 8mm film taken by the family at the peak of the farm.
Nikki Horowitz
PERSONAL PROJECTIONS is a collaborative multimedia documentary video series that utilizes projection interaction between actors, dancers, and musicians.
Maya Crossman
This multimedia gallery installation at the Stamps School creates a sequence of enclosed environments that takes participants through a journey of sensory processing.