THESIS - FALL 2025
03
Progress update 2: Research Findings + Refined Inquiry Space Diagram.Follow your research plan – read / watch / experience your chosen sources. Record your findings: from each source, what did you learn? What piqued your interest, surprised or intrigued you? Be specific, including quotes / passages / scenes / images / interactions.
Look at your findings, take some time to reflect: how do your sources relate to each other? Do you need to update or refine your inquiry space diagram based on your findings? Maybe you remove or add an area/axis, define it more narrowly, or add more specific inquiry directions? If so, include your updated diagram in your post.
Look into NYU schools and departments, and into classes taught at ITP. Find 3 experts at NYU who are working on areas that relate to your findings. Ask to interview one of them – whether you do this now (at the beginning of your process), or later (once your concept is more formed), is up to you.
Research Sources
Sarah Rothberg
FOREVER MEETINGS: GREY ZONE OF TWO MINDS
2025 FOREVER MEETINGS: GREY ZONE OF TWO MINDS is a framed, custom software program that prompts two AI agents, embodied as avatars, to have infinite, never-repeating conversations. Rothberg’s handmade frames are guided by intuition and mask the monitors beneath. As standalone sculptural objects, their glittering surfaces are charming, despite their spikes and hidden features. This juxtaposition is mirrored by Rothberg’s seemingly-emotive avatars that mask the work’s purely computational AI output. The program uses three components as system prompts: a topic, conversation style, and pair of opposing personas. For example, one agent might be instructed to “role play as someone very selfish”, while the other takes on the persona of selflessness. While the work's theme never changes, every hour the avatars are programmed to shift their conversation type, ranging from argumentative to flirtatious language. This continues in perpetuity through a language model stored locally on the artwork’s hard drive, serving as a 2025 time capsule of conversational AI.
Reflection: I love the custom frame that masks the monitor, making the digital content appear to be more organic and grounded. Surprisingly I also love the text-driven narrative that this work embodies, that might be something that I want to incorporate.
Cameron Kostopoulos
In the Current of Being
2025 In the Current of Being is a haptic VR experience that shares the true story of Carolyn Mercer, a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy. Physically connect with Carolyn’s story through wearable haptic vests, sleeves and gloves that will allow the participant to share her experience through the profound sensation of touch.
Reflection: I went to see this piece at the Tribeca Immersive Film Festival this summer. Although it was a VR experience, I was mind blown by its physical display.
As the audience, I appreciated that the design of the physical display is coherent to the theme of the VR experience. It added physical context as well as a wowing factor when I first entered the space. In terms of the VR content, it was a narrative story told from the first and third perspetive. It was polished and complete, telling a tramatic story with effective technology. My friend who went with me did not like the experience because it felt suffocating, which I felt was somewhat the point of the experience. But I also understand the limitation to a medium like VR and haptic devices. When the haptics is too strong, it might interfere with the actual experience that the audience have with the content.
If I were to make a completely digital experience, I would love to also have a deisgn for the physical display.
Office Hours Notes:
Gabe:
- multiple iterations of similar idea
- think of themes, personal? about current state of the world?
- object based storytelling
Sarah:
-avatars having conversations in performance settings
-speech to text and unity app for animating
-yaesl, interaction as a site for poetic meaning
-how long do people engage with it, what’s the ideal audience
-things that i want and i dont want, and things taht im okay with, put it somehwere you can look at all the time
-what i want in the process? what i want to practice more?
-what’s the version of it if its more this and less of this? big small, more about nature or more about personal story
-if my thesis is due next day what would it be?
Yulia:
theme
pattern exercise - take photos of things that go together
nature/ landscape/ peeking into windows
go to a bookstore, and find book
the creative circle book
Proud:
one ceramic flow to another
projection on ceramics
one person or multiple people, if i were there
write down key words and connect them to see what projects could come out of it
tips and tricks
-group the topics, find similarities
-emotional vs. fun
-make it so big that it’s a three people experience, make the screen interactive, people can collaborate, and it leaves a mark on the screen, once people interact with it the screen also reacts