Graduate students in the 2022-2023 IMA Low Res master's degree program displayed their interactive media thesis works in a show in the Interactive Media Arts studio in late June. The works invited visitors to step into immersive, thought-provoking experiences and demonstrated their unique perspectives and methodologies, utilizing an array of emerging technologies and tools. The two-day show drew a diverse audience, including local artists, technologists, curators, NYU alumni and the greater Shanghai community.
Jun Shu’s “Zhifanyemao (枝繁叶茂),” an interactive installation about the continuation of life and creation of memories.
Left: Noah Dixon showing his “Interactive Theatre in the Digital Age” project to visitors. Right: Visitors interacting with Ai Xia’s “Before the Sun Rises,” a game where players work together as kindred spirits of the forest to help regrow a dying land.
Wentao Wang showing “Futurecraft: a Collaborative World Building Game” to visitors. The project uses AR to help players simulate the potential global consequences of their decisions and explore how we might work together to build a better future.
Left: Jason Snell explains his “Ecstasy and Dissolution” work to visitors. Right: A soundscape design and series of soundbaths guides audience members into a waking dream state with real-time heart and brainwave activity.
Visitors experience Yiyang Cao’s “Excavating Eternal Beings - a Past Life Regression," an audiovisual installation telling the story of the artist’s future incarnations based on a past life regression, exploring patterns throughout nine possible lifetimes and continuing the artist’s own life journey informed by these relationships.
Left: Jamie Mccoy’s “Nesting” project showcases non-human technologies and bird behaviors, including their practice of building nests and crafting homes. Right: Sehmon Burnam’s "Hallucinated Voicemail," an interactive audio work reflecting on humanity in the age of AI and machine learning.
Zoe-alanah Robert’s “Del(Eat)me," an exploration into data collection, digital rights, and the catharsis of group destruction of personal data.
Yueqing Dai showing "Silver Valley'' to visitors. The project, which aims to foster intergenerational connections, is an immersive application that merges in-game & post-game experiences with real stories based on interviews with elderly people.
Left: Show visitors interact with Ada Huang’s "Body Domain," a multimedia installation using dance, computer vision and real-time projection to examine our bodies and sense of self. Right: Elizabeth Engelman’s "Perceptive Radio Waves," a device exploring modern telecommunication.
Left: Yugian Ma’s “Don’t Look at Me When I’m Coding," an interactive installation that plays with the behavioral differences between a human coder and an AI coder. Right: Yingyi Hu showing "The Wheel of Anxiety," a web-based application driven by P5.js addressing daily anxiety.
Chelsea Heard’s "Beyond the Spectrum," an immersive installation that uses illustrations, audio, and chalk footsteps to pay homage to the artist's grandparents, as well as to honor significant African American contributions throughout history.
Left: Show visitors learning about Dora Do’s project, “Merging Worlds: Bridging Analog and Digital Photography," a personally crafted 3D printed camera that blends analog photography with integration of digital features. Right: Daisy Lu’s “Sleepy Paradise," a digital application that provides accessible audio-visual experiences for the elderly.
Left: A visitor experiencing Renton Ling’s “Last Night Memory," an interactive film that uses varied storytelling methods to elicit both empathy and understanding. Right: Yunshan Jiang’s “Kleshas," a generative art project situated in a virtual ecological environment that visualizes and simulates negative emotions derived from Buddhist concepts.
Left: Show visitors line up to experience Suirun Zhao’s “Classifier," an interactive installation that provokes reflection on facial emotion recognition systems. Right: Visual print-outs of individual user ratings from “Classifier.”
Left: Nicole Padilla’s “Haptic Memory,” an immersive storytelling experience exploring the psychosomatic impacts of our memories, combining first-person audio narratives with haptic reactions within a wearable device. Right: Suri Li’s “Seatizen,” an installation inspired by climate change.
Left: Zaida Aleman’s “Salsa Y Cafe,” an experiential project exploring the connection between digital and physical media. Right: Anney Norton’s community-based website project “Self Talk to Self Confidence: Inspiring Women Through Positive Affirmations.”
IMA Low Res Graduates who Participated in the Group Show:
Zaida Aleman, Sehmon Burnam, Yiyang Cao, Yueqing Dai, Noah Dixon, Dora Do, Elizabeth Engelman, Chelsea Heard, Yinyi Hu, Ada Huang, Yunshan Jiang, Suri Li, Renton Ling, Daisy Lu, Yuqian Ma, Jamie McCoy, Anney Norton, Nicole Padilla, Katherine Park, Zoe-Alanah Robert, Jun Shu, Jason Snell, Wentao Wang, Ai Xia, Suirun Zhao
Photo Credits:
Zhuo Cheng, Phil Guo, Renton Ling, NYU Shanghai University Communications
Special Thanks for Additional Support:
Jaye TC Cho, Samantha Cui, Brian Ho, Ruta Kruliauskaite, Sylvia Lee, Craig Protzel, Tian Qin, Steve Sun, Nuntinee Tansrisakul, Danni Wang, Kevin Xu, Sonny Yan, Jesse Yu, Yuguang Zhang, Joyce Zheng, Yaoyao Zhuang
IMA Low Res is a unique one-year graduate school experience in creative and purposeful application of technology that offers three site-specific sessions across New York University’s global network in New York, Berlin, and Shanghai, interspersed by two semesters of online learning.
For a larger representation of the types of work that happen at IMA Low Res, see the IMA Low Res 2023 thesis project archive.