Lend Me Your Heart: Emergence from Within (2018-2019)
My research began in 2018 while working towards my undergraduate thesis project which, at the time, was known as Lend Me Your Heart: Emergence from Within. It was an interactive installation where movements of the participants were tracked and drawn out through a projection. Marks were created using a sensor and colour tracking system programmed in Python's OpenCV to track the items worn on the wrists and ankles. As a major component of my undergraduate thesis research, I examined what exposing these digitized marks could reveal about the participants’ interactions with the system through the process of creating them.
Video: Video documentation of undergraduate thesis project in 2019.
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Breaking Barriers: Transforming Breaking Movements and its Culture (2019-2021)
Under the title, "Breaking Barriers: Transforming Breaking Movements and its Culture", this project shifts its focus to increase the sense of inclusion in the culture and practice of breakdancing. The work applies interactive machine learning and methods from dance training to this context of “breaking", with the goal of creating “interactive spaces” that invite movements and expressions by participants of diverse gender, sexuality and abilities that might otherwise feel excluded from these performance spaces. The project builds from my personal relationship to “b-girl” culture in Toronto, and provides training in the rigorous use of technological and scholarly methods to affect positive societal change. The project is thus expected to benefit both this particular community, and more broadly provide an example of an inclusive and ethical use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in embodied, communal social spaces. The following is a documentation of this work in progress.
Breaking Barriers Progress Documentation (Nov. 17, 2020)
More in-depth information could be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357698494_Towards_Inclusive_and_Interactive
Breaking Barriers Final Documentation, 2021.