Examples of Student Work

Massachusetts College of Art & Design

SIM376x: Programming for Artists (Max/MSP)

Lyle Murphy

Lyle wanted to find a way to stretch Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” so that one performance would last a full year. He didn’t want there to be any pitch slowdown, rather it should sound more like all the instruments were playing the score slowly enough that it would coordinate with the earth’s actual seasons. He reduced a recording to sound grains then fattened each of those grains about twenty thousand times its original length in real time using a Max patch. The result is a hypnotic soundscape that changes ever so slightly as you listen.

Here is a screenshot of Lyle’s Max patch.

Lenka Chludová

Lenka worked on several ambitious projects in my class. “Trees and Wires” is an interactive piece that composites several channels of video into one responding to sound made by people in a space. Says Lenka: “It is an interactive installation wherein the way persons make sounds influences whether the skyscape is filled with images of trees or wires… The natural and technological have an equal standing in the duality of this space and the viewer is in a dynamic relationship to the sounds and images.”

This is an image from the video as it is being composited.

Jake Lee High

“Rain Field” is an interactive sound, smell and light installation. Jake had already been working on this big project for a year when he took my class. We worked on some custom electronics together.

This is an image of an early prototype:

Emerson College

VM260b: Introduction to Digital Media Production

Tattoo Exercise

The students had two choices in this exercise.

Find an image of a person with a tattoo and then remove that tattoo in Photoshop or
Give somebody a tattoo

We showed the completed projects (before and after) in class and asked everyone to guess if the tattoo had been added or removed. This turned into a really fun project! Here are a few examples.

Amanda McGrady

I suspect this is an ‘after’ image, though I’m not sure.

Dana Ericson

Definitely an ‘after’ image.

Derek Desmond

Can you guess?

VM464: Programming for Artists (Processing)

I had a wide range of students in this class from beginning programmers to one highly skilled programmer. The students were given free reign to make any interactive project they wanted. I negotiated with them to ensure that it could be completed within the semester. Here are a few examples of the work they produced.

Ashley Tarbet

Ashley put this Processing file on her website ”Fear Watch.” It tracks the growing cloud of fear that follows every new story about terrorism.

Cyle Gage

In Cyle’s words the 4chan Image Scrubber ”scans /b/ every 10 seconds and grabs all of the images, and then randomly throws them on your screen once a second. I’ve written more about it here and here. It’s a pretty simple program with disastrous results.”