Class of 2020

Project/Mission Statement

My personal mission is to be as culturally creative and inclusive of my whole-self as possible in whatever I do. I want to provide an essence of intersectionality in the work that I do while educating others on the importance of highlighting the stories that aren’t being told as much. Also, I want my work to combat the lingering presence of imposter syndrome and thrive in the feeling of belonging in whatever space I take a part of. Lastly, I want to do everything with integrity and be my best self throughout the process.

My project, ‘The Return: Me Koo Fie’, previously a dance show, now film, is an art piece that searches to define the meaning of home. ‘Me Koo Fie’ translates to ‘I went home’ in my native Ghanaian language, Twi. My SIP allows me to be culturally creative while challenging me to look into my many identities throughout the process. Now, with the medium being changed from dance show to video, I’ve still made sure to emphasize the importance of staying true to my original message, the message of defining what home means and using technology and dance to portray that. With that being said, I am truly grateful for the Ammerman Center for continuing to challenge me throughout this process and dig deeper into my personal mission. 

Additional Material

The Return: Me Koo Fie

Project/Mission Statement

What does a face look like in the eyes of a camera?

“Disruption” is meant for us to take a step back from life as we know it and challenge the technology that we are learning to adapt to. As this technology becomes more popular and widespread in our lives, data found from facial recognition technology has been used, often times, without the consent of the face itself. I would like my audience to pause and think: how will the increase of facial recognition technology affect you? How will it impact others? Should we be comfortable with the abilities of this technology?

In this project, I have created filters that disrupt mainstream facial recognition algorithms. These filters can be put on any image broadcast to social media that will hide a face from these algorithms. This experience is meant to be uncomfortable, allowing the audience to see what exactly it means for a face to be read by a camera and how we can take measures to disrupt this normalized phenomena.

Additional Material

Disruption: Learning to Block Facial Recognition Technology

Project/Mission Statement

My creative mission is to use video games as an educational tool without having to sacrifice the fun that goes into playing games. In my experience there exist a reasonable amount of educational games in the world; however, they are often created for younger audiences and don’t do a good job in replicating what makes playing video games fun. These types of games sacrifice so much in terms of gameplay, replayability, and story in order to make them educational and often fit for kids to play. I don’t think that games need to be this rigid in how they fall in being either fun or educational; instead I think that games can be both fun to play and great teaching tools for a vast array of topics. Given how the popularity of video games have grown over the past couple years, I would like to see, and contribute to, the development of educational games, especially for adults. Just because most adults don’t take classes anymore doesn’t mean they should stop learning and I think that video games are a great way to teach people who might not feel like they have the time or energy to learn new things.

My creative mission correlates directly with my senior integrative project: a video game to teach about the late Roman Republic. In my game you play as a Roman member of the political elite trying to gain status and power during this fascinating time in Ancient Roman history. One main goal of this game is to balance the fun of making decisions and interacting with historical figures, while keeping the game based in historical facts so that the player will learn about this time period by simply playing through the game. It is this learning without explicitly teaching strategy which I hope will help my game reach a wider audience and make the game fun to play. At this point my game is not ready to be released to the general public but I plan to continue working on it after I graduate so that eventually I can make it available, free of charge, for anyone who wants to play it and learn.

Additional Material

Rome Revisited: Using Video Games to Teach about the Ancient World

Project/Mission Statement

As artists, developers, and collaborators we have a duty to listen carefully to the world. Art is a wide-reaching medium that communicates across boundaries: interpreting experiences, traumas, and joys, and reforming them into new packages for us to explore. It is our duty to consciously and intentionally develop our media, and to highlight what is important to us on a personal and emotional level.

With this project, I hope to show how virtual spaces can be used to make important changes in one's perception of reality. As someone who struggles with anxiety, I easily get overwhelmed with the world and its obligations. Finding ways to manage my anxiety and mental focus has been a challenging, multi-year experience, and I hope my virtually fabricated relaxation and interaction environments can help others through these stressful times.

Additional Material

UN//REALITY: Depths of Self in Virtual Spaces

Project/Mission Statement

My mission is to create art that inspires collective empathy. I want to make art that reaches audiences and communities, not just individual people. I am a storyteller. I believe that storytelling is the most basic method of human communication, and without stories we are just beings without a past and therefore without a purpose. I believe in the power of storytelling as a tool to inspire empathy, and I believe that there are many different ways to tell stories. My goal in making “(Re)Sequenced” is to analyze my experience in educational institutions, specifically the moments where my presence as a Dyslexic left me feeling unwelcome and unvalued. This piece is informed by the neuroscience of the condition, as well as the lived experience that comes from its circumstances.

As a dance, theater, and digital media artist, I focus on the ways people interact with themselves, each other, and their surroundings. I believe that theater is a form that allows complicated analysis of circumstance and emotion; dance is a form that allows for abstraction of a narrative that maintains a single focus; and digital media in a performance context allows for the bending of space in ways that seem to defy the laws of physics. Performance-based arts allow for a window of time where a group of people are in a single space. I seek to use the tools at my disposal to create an experience that allows for escapism, understanding, and movement towards a collective understanding of our humanity.

Additional Material

(Re)Sequenced: A Multimedia Dance-Theater Experiential Performance

Project/Mission Statement

Ever since high school, I have been intrigued by the representation of gender through different subjects throughout my academic experience; I learned about how women were historically depicted or expected to act in society, and I was then exposed to how women were fighting against these stereotypes.

This resulted in wanting to do my project on the lack of gender representation of public art in New York City, where I have lived my whole life and been a large part of my identity. Identifying as a woman, I am able to discuss my experiences in viewing these statues for others to witness and be able to bring this lack of gender representation to others and how we can start to change and address this problem.

Additional Material

They Only Built Five: Gender Representation in NYC Public Art

Project/Mission Statement

I love understanding how the world around me works. This desire to understand the physical world is what led me to study physics. There is such brilliance in the items we use in our everyday lives such as cars, microwaves, telephones, and cameras. Similarly, there are physical nuances in our human experiences, like watching the sun set, feeling the breeze, or playing catch. Through my education, career, and hobbies I hope to pursue a deeper understanding of how physics constantly surrounds me, and I hope to always maintain my unwavering curiosity about the world.

My senior integrative project has allowed me to continue exploring the physics I encounter on a daily basis, while also sharing it with others. Many people think physics is boring, difficult, or impossible for them to understand. My project uses augmented reality to help people visualize the forces, field, currents, and other physical phenomena around them. I hope this visual and interactive platform will make physics fun and accessible for everyone!

Additional Material

Seeing the Unseeable: Exploring the Physical World through Augmented Reality

Project/Mission Statement

For my Ammerman project, I want to combine my love for music theory and teaching into a creative tool meant to help musicians when writing. It also allows me to explore a fascination I have with cross-modal art as well as ways of circumventing writer’s block. This project helps composers in two ways: It provides guidelines for creating art in the musical realm from the visual, and it helps with musical writer’s block through meaningful artistic limitations.

Additional Material

Making Music From Color: A Compositional Method

Project/Mission Statement

The goal of my project is to reflect my predictions for the future of fashion industry and how it will function. I believe digital clothing projection will work its way into shopping and the process of design, ultimately for easier use, creation, and sustainability.

This installation is in place to demonstrate my newfangled and experimental idea in real time. By making it an installation instead of a tool, it will allow me to have combined my art studies as well.