Hello everyone! My name’s Ticha and I am currently a sophomore in the School of Art, though I also plan to major in Computer Science. This semester in IACD I hope to be comfortable with a variety of media-arts programming environments so that I may create lots of cool projects in the future. :)

https://twitter.com/creativethumbs

https://github.com/creativethumbs

Augmented Projection: Musical Stairs

For Golan’s EMS II class last semester, I created a simple augmented projection on one of the stairwell signs in Gates. (Below is the description of the project I wrote up last semester)

‘Musical Stairs’ is a project that examines the role of music in our mundane lives. It was partly inspired by ‘Casse’ by Andreas Gysin and Sidi Vanetti, which effectively employs sound to add appeal to their simple projection.

An old habit of mine is tapping my fingers on a desk or flat surface in a manner that imitates playing the piano. It is a habit I thought I had grown out of, but only recently resurfaced due to my frustration with not having easy access to a piano. Clearly, I am not the only one who enjoys using this ‘musical instrument surrogacy’ in the event of having idle hands – I have seen enough people drumming on chairs and playing table keyboards to know this for certain. My projection attempts to manifest this concept of using an everyday object as a surrogate for a specific musical instrument. In addition, it redefines the image of a staircase by recontextualizing it into a musical situation. The way the program works is simple: when the user clicks on an point on the screen a white ball is spawned, which changes color and plays a note pertaining to the step it makes contact with.