Author: Aditi Adhikari

My Midterm Project Concept

Last week, after a long and tiring day, I decided to take a short break and treat myself to a simple dinner. I made a fresh salad, seasoned it well, and added a generous scoop of hummus. I thought that a good meal would help me feel better. However, halfway through eating, I noticed a fly lying right in my food. The sight instantly ruined my appetite and left me feeling uneasy, worried I might end up with a stomach ache. I couldn’t help but think how much better the evening would have been if that fly hadn’t landed in my meal.

Interestingly, a friend later shared a similar unpleasant experience of finding a worm in their food. That conversation sparked an unusual but fun idea for a game: Worm Against Sanity. In this game, the player goes around the campus covering spots like the library, D1, D2, marketplace, and the Palms eliminating worms before they ruin the food.

.One of the most challenging parts of building Worm Against Sanity was making the game seamlessly switch between multiple screens while also animating the girl and worm sprites so that they moved realistically across the canvas. I wanted the opening screen, the play area, and the menu to feel like distinct spaces, but still connect smoothly when the player clicked a button. To achieve this, I kept track of a screen variable that updates whenever a mouse click falls within certain button coordinates. In the draw() function, I check the current value of screen and display the correct background and elements for that state. At the same time, I focused on fluid character and enemy movement. For the girl, I downloaded a running GIF and converted it into a sprite sheet, then wrote logic to cycle through the sprite frames every time an arrow key is pressed, flipping the image when she moves left. The worm uses a similar sprite-sheet approach, but it continuously advances across the screen on its own, updating its frame at regular time intervals and reducing the player’s life if it escapes. Coordinating these mechanics screen transitions, sprite-sheet animation, and frame-by-frame movement took careful planning and debugging, but it created a smooth and lively gameplay experience once everything clicked together.

I also experimented with adding interactive features, such as having the character jump on a worm when I move my hand or make a fist. Although I haven’t fully figured out how to implement motion-based controls yet, I’m actively exploring solutions and refining the concept.

In terms of visuals, I wanted the game to feel lively and unique, so I used AI tools to generate a cartoony illustration of the NYUAD campus to serve as the background for the different screens. This gives the game a playful, campus-specific atmosphere and saves time that would have gone into manual drawing.

 

My Work so Far

 

The part that stopped me was Suicide Box (1996), a camera pointed at the Golden Gate Bridge, quietly counting every time someone jumped. It sounds blunt, almost cold, yet I like the idea behind it. The artists (Natalie Jeremijenko and Kate Rich) flipped surveillance on its head: instead of policing people, the camera bore witness to a tragedy that the official numbers under-reported. I even looked it up afterward and found more debate and follow-up writing. Some people doubt the footage, others question the ethics of recording suicides. That tension actually makes the piece stronger for me; it shows how art can force uncomfortable truths into view.

 

What struck me next was how the essay treats technology as something physical and playful. Levin keeps pointing out that success often comes from the scene you build, not just the code you write: light a wall evenly, add reflective tape, adjust the lens. I like that attitude. It feels more like setting a stage than crunching math, and it makes computer vision sound approachable even fun for artists and students. The student project LimboTime, for example, came together in one afternoon with a webcam and a bright background. That shows how the simplest setups can spark creative interaction.

 

Overall, reading this made me want to experiment myself. The mix of raw data, social urgency, and poetic framing in Suicide Box shows how art and code can meet to notice what society tries not to see and maybe, slowly, help change it.

As an international student at NYUAD who often travels, I’ve found sensor-activated washroom taps frustrating and time-consuming, whether in airports or public restrooms in different countries. There are different types of sensors in different locations, many of which behave unpredictably, and sometimes they simply don’t work at all. Even the taps in NYUAD occasionally fail. When I first arrived, I remember waving my hands around trying to figure out where to start the water, unsure if the faucet was broken or if I was using it wrong. From Don Norman’s perspective, this is a textbook example of weak signifiers (no clear visual cue where to place hands), poor feedback (no light or sound to confirm detection), and a missing conceptual model (no simple mental picture of how the sensor works). A better design could include a soft light to indicate the active zone and an immediate, gentle chime when the sensor registers movement. Thinking beyond faucets, In Interactive Media, I want every sketch and installation I build to “explain itself,” so that users can start playing without extra instructions. Don Norman’s principles give me a practical checklist: I can design strong affordances by making buttons and draggable objects look touchable or moveable; create clear signifiers through animated highlights, glowing borders, or subtle sounds; keep mappings natural so a slider that moves right always increases a value; and provide immediate feedback with color changes, vibration, or playful sound effects. Most importantly, I can help visitors form the right conceptual model by giving them a short, visual introduction or letting the interface demonstrate its own rules when the design is complex. 

This summer I had the chance to spend my J-Term in Prague, Czech Republic, and I kept finding myself drawn to the Vltava River. It flows from north to south right through the center of the city and is visible almost everywhere you go. Growing up near a famous lake in Nepal, I’ve always felt a special connection to water, so the Vltava immediately felt familiar.

I’ve long believed that rivers and lakes quietly collect memories of people, nature, culture, and whole civilizations as if they’re absorbing the life around them. Walking along the Vltava, I sensed that same deep, layered history. As I learned more, I discovered just how central the river has been to Prague’s story.

In this artwork, I tried to capture impressions I had in Prague. The colorful houses painted in shades I noticed all around Prague represent the charming, almost storybook homes seen throughout much of Europe. They bring in the vibrant palette I remember from my time there. The flowing text woven through the piece symbolizes the countless memories and stories the Vltava carries, and, more broadly, the memories held by all great water bodies.

My work

 

During marhaba week I was being trained as a Weyak facilitator. The drill was simple: one person speaks, the other listens really listens and then reflects back what they understood. I tried using that outside the training too, with friends. I noticed something uncomfortable: I’m decent at the first two moves, listening and interpreting, but I stumble on the third one that is speaking back clearly and on time. Reading Crawford snapped that pattern into focus. His “listen, think, speak” cycle didn’t feel like theory only. 

Also, I don’t agree with everything. He says reading a book isn’t interactive. I get his point (a book can’t answer back), but as a reader I still feel a kind of inner talk with the text. For design work, his strict rule helps; for real life, it feels a bit narrow. Still, his main idea don’t confuse reaction with real back-and-forth was very useful.

The book also made me think about control. Sometimes a system looks interactive, but the user is just pressing “next” while the program forces its path. That’s not a real conversation. It also somehow reminds me of home: there’s a lot of noise and movement during the protest against corruption, but the direction is being set by a few people with their own goals. Everyone is acting, but very few are actually listening. It’s busy, not interactive exactly the difference Crawford talks about.

 

While reflecting on all this, I realized something about my own art. The digital sketch I had been working on suddenly looked lifeless—beautiful in pieces but, to me, dead. It wasn’t listening to the user; it just sat there. That recognition pushed me to start over. I stripped out the old smoke elements and rebuilt the scene around the burning parliament building, designing an interaction where a single click can pause the fire and wash the frame in blue. In the process, Crawford’s idea of a true “listen–think–speak” loop came alive for me: my sketch now responds instead of merely flashing back.

 

Lastly, what I appreciated in the book is how stubbornly he refuses to call every flashy response “interactive.” He cares about the quality of the loop: how precisely the system listens, how intelligently it processes, and how meaningfully it responds.

My concept:

This week my mind has been heavy with news from home. There are protests happening in my country, and instead of bringing hope, some of them have turned destructive. Bad actors disguised as protesters are setting fire to public property, using a genuine Gen-Z movement against corruption as cover to erase their own crimes. Several police stations were burned, letting prisoners escape. Thousands of criminals are now roaming free, which makes me constantly worry about my family’s safety.

This piece of art is my response to that chaos. The base of the picture shows fire representing the burning buildings and the anger on the streets. Above it, thick smoke rises and spreads, like the dark energy that hangs over everything. In the middle there’s a shape that at first was meant to be drifting smoke, but as I worked, it began to look like a person. So later I decided to embrace that.

That smoky figure stands for the opportunists, the gangs, and the political players who twist the protest for their own gain. Just like smoke, their hearts are gray. They walk on fire because they don’t fear destruction; they only care about their own benefit, even as the country suffers.

Through this piece I wanted to capture both the physical reality of fires and smoke and the deeper feeling of a society clouded by selfishness and violence.

After I thought I was done with the art I started to read The Art of Interactive Design. This made me see that an earlier sketch I had made felt dull and not interactive at all. I removed the original smoke class and all its elements and began drawing the parliament building once Asia’s most luxurious and one of the largest palaces before it was destroyed by fire. I worked to mimic its structure and sweeping rooflines.

For the interactive element, when a viewer clicks on the building, the flames stop and a wash of blue appears, symbolizing calm and happiness. Releasing the click reignites the fire. Each time I clicked to halt the burning, I felt a rush of conflicting emotions an almost physical wish that I could do the same in real life, to save the parliament and, in some way, my country itself.

Process and Reflection:

When I first started this piece, I pictured thick smoke clouds spreading across the top of the canvas. I spent a long time trying to build that effect by dropping bubble after bubble, checking their spots with console.log(mouseX, mouseY), and trying to make the shapes feel alive. But after a while it turned into a slow, repetitive task. The more I worked, the less it looked like the smoky sky I had imagined.

In the middle of that frustration, something unexpected happened. One cluster of bubbles began to form a faint human shape. At first I thought it was just a glitch in my layout, but the longer I looked, the more it felt right. It reminded me of how, in real life, people with hidden motives were blending into the protests. That was the moment the “smoke man” was born.

The background went through a similar transformation. I had started with a grayish color to match the idea of smoke, but the fire didn’t stand out. On a whim I tried a deep black, and suddenly the flames glowed with an intensity that felt closer to the real scene. Black made the fire look alive, and it captured the mood of a night filled with tension and danger when prisoners were set free.

Looking back, the way this piece evolved feels close to the story I wanted to tell. Plans I was sure about like a full smoky sky kept falling apart, and new shapes kept appearing out of nowhere. The smoke man, which began as a small accident, became the heart of the artwork, just like how unexpected figures can change the course of a protest.

If I had more time, I would push the scene even further: let the smoke drift and curl like real fumes, add buildings, maybe even small moving figures to suggest the chaos on the ground. But even without those details, this process showed me how art sometimes leads rather than follows. What started as a careful plan turned into a piece shaped by chance, change, and the very uncertainty I was trying to capture.

My Sketch:

Before watching the video, I used to doubt modern art a lot. Many times I would look at paintings or installations and feel they were meaningless or random, like they didn’t really say anything. But after listening to Casey Reas’ Eyeo 2012 talk, I realized that even when art looks random, there can be hidden patterns within it, patterns the artist sets into motion but doesn’t fully control. That changed how I see modern art or arts with randomness not as nonsense, but as something that balances freedom and structure.

One of the moments that stuck with me was when Reas mentioned Jean Arp’s practice of dropping paper shapes and gluing them where they landed. At first, this felt almost like a joke to me like how could that be art? But the more I thought about it, the more I understood the courage it takes to let go of total control. Arp allowed a chance to step in and become part of the artwork, and in doing so he opened up a space for something unexpected to appear.

Moreover, I was surprised at how alive his examples felt. Even though they were created by code, they reminded me of nature like plants growing in unpredictable directions or waves forming on the surface of water. When Reas used the word “homeostasis,” it clicked for me. I paused the video and looked up the meaning to understand it better. I learned that it’s a biological term describing how systems keep balance, like how our bodies regulate temperature or how living things adjust to survive. That connection made the talk feel deeper, because I began to see his generative art almost like a living organism rather than just random code. It showed me that what seems like chaos can actually be a system constantly finding its own balance, just like in nature. Later, when I stepped outside my room, I noticed how randomness and order combine all around us in the way stars scatter across the sky or the way tree branches spread into patterns.

After this talk, I don’t see randomness as meaningless anymore. I see it as another tool, maybe even a partner, that can push art into places the artist alone couldn’t reach. For me, that was the biggest takeaway: the idea that beauty can emerge not just from control, but from the spaces where control ends.

 

My Concept

When I thought of making art, many things came to mind. As a child, if someone asked me to make art, I would draw a flower. As time went on, my commitment to art slowly faded, and I began spending more of my time with friends and family. During my teenage years, I mostly loved hanging out with my friends.

Now, being far away from both my family and friends, I find myself missing them deeply. That feeling is what gave me the idea: I will make a bunch of flowers to represent myself, my social circle, and my family.

While writing the code, I wasn’t sure at first what kind of pattern I wanted for the flowers. I began with a line-like structure, but it didn’t look very good. So I looked for inspiration watching Casey’s video, exploring art documents and the first thing that came to mind was the Fibonacci series, with its spiral winding endlessly around and around. I tried to mimic that. I searched online for how to make it, and eventually created spirals.

 

I chose to make the flowers of the same kind rather than all different because, whenever I am with people, I tend to absorb their energy and reflect it back. It feels as though we are on the same wavelength, sharing a similar rhythm. That is why the flowers look alike. They represent that shared harmony. At the same time, each flower carries different colors within it, symbolizing the unique personalities of the people around me.

That’s how I ended up weaving together my love for math, my love for art, and my love for people. At the center of it all is me, the centerpiece flower. The background shifts too: it turns dark when left alone, showing the loss of color I feel whenever I lose someone in my life, and it turns light when surrounded by many flowers, reflecting the joy of being with people I love.

 

Code I am proud of:

When I was figuring out how to arrange my flowers, my first thought was to place them in a straight line, almost like a little garden bed, or maybe clustered together like a garland. But as I kept searching for better ideas and experimenting, I stumbled upon the Fibonacci spiral. It looked so elegant that I couldn’t resist trying to recreate it. Honestly, that attempt to mimic the spiral became one of my favorite parts of the code.

To bring it to life, I leaned on functions like cosine, sine, theta, and square root things I found online that could help shape the spiral pattern. But there was another challenge I faced: keeping everything centered as the pieces came closer and closer to one another. That’s when I discovered the translate function. It allowed me to shift and position the flowers neatly, and suddenly, the whole design came together in a way that felt intentional and balanced.

My Sketch

Reflection

If I had more time with this artwork, I would love to explore different ways of arranging the flowers and spirals. For example, I can imagine adding some interactive elements where the flowers respond to the user, maybe glowing when hovered over so that the piece feels alive, just like real connections between people. Another thing I would like to try is experimenting with different mathematical patterns beyond the Fibonacci spiral, to see how other sequences or shapes could carry meaning. Also, If I had time I would like to explore more on how I could make the cursor make the flower move smoothly. Currently, it feels a bit weird.

Moreover, what I really learned through this assignment is how much balance there is between creativity and problem-solving. At first, I was only thinking about how the flowers should look, but as I kept coding, I had to figure out how to make them align, how to center them, and how to keep the spiral flowing naturally. I realized that art in this form isn’t just about the final design. It’s about the small challenges along the way, the adjustments, and the discoveries that give the piece life.

Overall, this project showed me how I could bring together my love for math, art, and people into one place. The flowers don’t just make a pattern, they tell a story of connection, loss, and light, and I think that’s what makes this piece meaningful to me.

 

My concept: Continue reading “Week 1: Self Portrait”