I am applying to work with Hiroshi Ishii and the Tangible Media team, Zach Lieberman and the Future Sketches team, or Andrew Lippman and the Viral Communications team. As an artist and software engineer, I have a continual aspiration to explore the intersection of art and technology, and as a researcher, my goal is to rethink the role of physicality in human-machine interactivity. Physicality is deeply human, and there is an inherent wealth of memory, knowledge, and generational experience built over a person’s lifetime, that remains unemployed in a physically passive state. As the digital presence continues to progress its integration into daily routines, acting as a primary source for socializing, information, activism, and creativity, I am interested in how intentionally reimaging physicality can impact these experiences. The anti-disciplinary nature of the Media Lab, utilizing a vision of the future to drive innovation rather than bounding problem-solving approaches by the current status quo, resonates with my motive as an artist and the exact reason I became a software engineer. 

As a queer woman, my identity is a literal embodiment of pushing against social norms and finding the richness within the margins of doing something differently. This experience has greatly informed my professional path and as a result manifested projects that are unique, sustain their relevance over time as communities evolve, and do not adhere to the traditional approaches to a problem. My journey spans a range of experiences, each centering the role of physicality within vastly different contexts. This includes creating underground performance space in a repurposed semi-truck trailer in East Vancouver to internationally touring as a performer for some of Canada’s most acclaimed and established choreographers to developing a gallery-styled installation as an educational prototype for the performing arts community to directing on-set motion capture shoots for video-to-animation and audio-to-animation machine learning tools in the visual effects industry. Each experience has illuminated how art and technology can empower one another and the potential of developing new experiences when blurring the boundaries of each discipline. 

My first project witnessing the community impact through the pursuit of reestablishing the relationship of spatial arrangement to shape audience engagement within a creative context was Boombox, a repurposed, 53 foot out-of-service semi truck trailer converted into a performance space. Boombox was co-founded alongside two colleagues, with a vision to explore how performer-audience dynamics can be reformed through an unconventional, site-specific venue. The inherent tunnel-like architecture of the space, the unassuming external invisibility (benefitting our operations as we were breaking several City of Vancouver bi-law regulations) and an immediate, full-body immersion when entering the make-shift theater, disrupted the classical forms of live-performance presentation in Vancouver. Deeply contrasting the typical proscenium theater structure, the space itself became a vessel of performance, facilitating brand new ways for viewers to experience the work. Artists had access to new elements of control, such as linear proximity and the physicality of the audience as they floated above the ground on wheels, subject to the shaking and vibrations of the space itself. Additionally, both the audience and performers were also vulnerable to uncontrollable externalities, such as sound interference due to rain, wind, traffic, or curious by-standers entering the space unannounced. This inadvertent connection to the outside world, which is often aimed to be sustained during a theater show, and intentionality surrounding audience viewership, curated a tone of reciprocal care between the audience and the performers. Boombox’s unconventionality inspired artists to actively shape the state of engagement of their viewers, asking the audience to become active participants in the performance at hand, and as a byproduct, nurtured a community that operationally sustained the longevity of the project for six years and counting. 

As an artist, following the experiences and impact of Boombox, I wanted to continue along the path of investigating the role of physical engagement in relation to other passive experiences and pivot towards the digital sector, commencing my graduate studies in computer science at Northeastern University. As I was progressing through my degree, the contemporary arts community was thrown into a state of stasis due to the pandemic closures. To counteract the closure of theater facilities, the Canada Council for the Arts (our primary arts funding institution) made major revisions to the granting system, encouraging a quick shift towards digitalization by launching a new series of funding initiatives encouraging performance artists to incorporate new technologies into their work. This in combination with the initial release of Chat-GPT,  gave rise to growing concerns around the future societal value of artists and whether generative AI could be a viable replacement. Suddenly, as artists began researching how to incorporate this new technology into their work, the importance of this community understanding the algorithmic underpinning of these tools that are being encouraged to integrate became pressing. Without a baseline knowledge of what an algorithm is doing behind the scenes, harmful deployment structures may be unintentionally embedded into their work. This became the cornerstone of my capstone, to create a gallery-installation styled prototype subtly infused with an educational framework for the contemporary performing arts sector in an accessible format. 

The surface-value presentation of the project proposed a way to democratize access to artist feedback, which is typically reserved for mature artists with substantial funding. Although a seemingly utopian concept, the ultimate goal was to invite uninformed users to question the construction of the prototype itself. The project utilized a pre-trained model that could classify bounded areas of a video stream’s frame as “good art” and “not art”, where the user is able to change the contents and spatial construction of the working area until the entire frame is filled with “good art”.  As artist’s iterated on the frame at hand, the feedback loop would inevitably come in conflict with the artist’s personal taste and prompt the conversation around the building blocks of the technology in an approachable way. By misaligning the strengths of an algorithm to the task at hand, the project highlighted how easily technology can be misappropriated despite being well-intentioned. This project was my first experience utilizing software as a provocative form, rather than an executional form, and ignited my excitement exploring unconventional applications of technology as impactful artistic expressions.

During my final eight months as a graduate student, in pursuit of finding a professional career path within an intersectional context of art and technology, I was hired full-time by Unity Technologies, where I currently work. Our team focuses on building facial and gestural animation models driven by audio, text and video inputs for professional digital artists. At the core, my work focuses on evaluating and implementing effective preprocessing techniques on differing formats of recorded physical movement to maximize the impact of training data. My role has centered around building scalable data preprocessing pipelines working with audio, video, and motion capture data, as well as post-processing visualization techniques. Throughout this work, I have had the opportunity to witness how machine learning tools continue to radically change the visual effects industry. Over the past two years, I have gained immensely valuable software development experience within production and research and development settings. I am now eager to employ these skills in a setting that channels both my artistic and software engineering identities simultaneously. At the Media Lab, I would be surrounded by highly motivated and immensely skilled anti-disciplinary individuals pushing the bounds of innovation, and is exactly the type of opportunity I am seeking as my next step.

As an in-awe observer of the Media Lab’s work for the past several years (since being introduced in my first semester of my graduate degree), I am incredibly excited by the prospects of joining the Media Lab. With my past contemporary performance experience and passion to reshape physicality within the sphere of human-computer interactions through unconventional software deployment structures, I see thematic parallels of exciting research conducted by the Tangible Media Group, the Future Sketches team, and the Viral Communications team. The rarity of opportunity to contribute to work pushing the boundaries of impactful innovation in a setting with world-renown mentors and collaborators, is what makes the Media Lab an important and incredible place, and exactly where I want to be.