What happens if I look inside?

Curiosity is a powerful force. Look Inside! explores how people react when presented with a non-descript box and an offer to look inside.

If people choose to peer inside the box, they find a mechanical drum set, which begins to play a simple but incessant beat. The beat grows in speed and intensity, and the box begins to shake!

At this point, people interacting with the piece have a choice: back away and attempt to dissociate themselves from the commotion they’ve caused, or keep watching. When Look Inside! was displayed, some people ran, and some stayed. Some even came back to play again.

Look Inside! explores curiosity, responsibility, and control. Would you look inside?

Quake utilizes csv files reom the USGS website, to simulate the magnitude of earthquakes occurring throughout the past 7 days. The USGS updates its systems every 5-15 minutes to map earthquakes that have happened recently and over the past few months, and further past. Quake brings awareness to the common occurrence of earthquakes, and acknowledges the 10 levels of magnitude of an earthquake. Some quakes occur and no one feels them, but they happened and it occurs more often around the world than one is aware of.

Using a solenoid and dividing

USGS Magnitude Scale of Earthquakes

CSV file can be found USGS Spreadsheet Applications

“When ships to sail the void between the stars have been built, there will step forth men to sail these ships.”

― Johannes Kepler

Satellites are funny things. It’s easy to forget how rapidly they circle the earth: it takes us a day to make a full rotation, but some satellites can complete an orbit in an hour and a half. At those speeds, reality is warped, and time bends.

What’s even stranger is that one of these satellites, the International Space Station, has people in it.

“Ships to Sail the Void” plots the trajectory of the Space Station with a laser that it shines onto nearby surfaces. When it is activated, it takes a minute to show the path that the Space station will take over the next one hundred minutes.

Every time that it runs, it pulls fresh data from the satellite database at n2yo.

It brings the strange, distant concept that is space travel down from the void, into your room.

Do concepts like privacy and basic rights only apply to humans? Do we believe we are the only species in the universe with the capacity to think on this level? What if we encounter extraterrestrials, only to find out we have not considered what rights we would grant them? How would they evaluate our relationship to other species on our own planet?

I hope to explore this topic a bit by “unobtrusively” embedding a monitoring system in various places with animal activity and capturing their presence in a shared space.

 The System

A raspberry pi uses a python script to check for movement using a PIR sensor. The sensor triggers the webcam to capture the image of whatever is present and uploads it to a flickr account. Then, a ifttt recipe takes that image and posts it to a dedicaded tumblr account here Universal Rights.

TEARS ON MY PILLOW from Claire Sophie on Vimeo.

A man goes to see a doctor. Doctor asks what seems to be the trouble. The man says, “Doc, I’m depressed. Simply, I can’t sleep sometimes, I can’t eat, I feel down and irritable most days. I just can’t feel ‘happy.'”

The Doctor says, “I’ve got the perfect fix for you. In town tonight is the great clown Pagliacci. He’s hysterically funny and will make you laugh till you cry. You will experience a joy unprecedented.”

The man bursts into tears. The doctor, confused asks why. “Doc, I am Pagliacci.”

Electronic instruments allow for a unparalleled level of potency.

However, their power is often is misguided and lost within layers and layers of application.

Tools that were created to connect users, often cause users to craft an image that strain the rift of disconnect, spiraling into depression.

Our product simplifies the cluttered process and allows users to cry into a pillow to directly support an unfeeling avatar.

Hopefully this candid approach can serve either as an apt metaphor for a lost generation, or a wake up call to end the self-fueling fire of emotional detachment and sadness.

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