STEAMplant supports the creation of interdisciplinary projects; these projects range from art installations that showcase science research and technology, to research studies which use the tools of science to investigate the creation of art and architecture. Each project culminates in a public engagement event, installation, product, or publication. Below is a list of our currently funded and completed projects.
To learn more about what types of projects we fund, click here.
100 Clapping Machines
Sirovich Family Resident – Taylor Levy
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Helio Takai & Che-Wei Wang
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100 Clapping Machines is an indoor installation of hundreds of individual clapping machines sometimes clapping in unison, sometimes seemingly randomly. Each clapper has a small microcontroller, a piezo (acting as a microphone) and a motor with a cam and spring to actuate two blocks of aluminum that hit each other to make a clap.
Each clapper claps on a time interval, but will also adjust its phase as it listens to match its neighbors’ claps, similar to how synchronous fireflies synchronize their flashing.
This project highlights the beauty of and the science of sync. As visitors walk around the installation and disrupt the synchronization of clappers they can see how syncing works and how we can become part of it or become disruptions in the system.
Luminary System
Sirovich Family Student Fellow – Elliot Lovegrove
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Helio Takai & Andrew Freiband
Click here for more Electronic computing is woven through many of our everyday activities. Yet for most users, the underlying mechanisms and processes remain opaque and mysterious, the province of a privileged few. In this project, we render the basic building blocks of code and electronic logic in a form that is both concrete and aesthetic, scaled and designed for human understanding. In the highly-advanced forms which capture headlines, computing is intimidating—but like every other technology, it ultimately rests on physical and relatively simple building blocks. We want to demystify that physical foundation by translating code operations down to the circuit level (AND gates, memory, etc.) and turning those circuits into a design that can wrap around a room. By painting the design with electroluminescent materials and running code through at a human time scale, we allow viewers to watch the process of computing in a way that is beautiful and comprehensible—illuminated in several senses of the word.
(In)Coherence: The Variable Edges Between Us And World
Sirovich Family Residents – Mary Jo Vath & Iliyan Ivanov
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Ágnes Mócsy & Ellen Berkovitch
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As an interdisciplinary team of a writer/documentarian, painter/art historian, psychiatrist/musician and physicist/filmmaker, we set off on an intrepid exploration of the arts and neuroscience, outfitted with virtual headlamps and microphones. We intend to approach the living field of our subject(s) with a multi-modal curiosity informed by the varietals of who we are and what we think about and work on. Our approach is a 21st century insistence that it’s not answering the questions but participating in asking them that leads to true interdisciplinarity.
“(In)Coherence: The Variable Edges Between Us and World” asks: Can neuroscience describe a neurological experience of the numinous? What is the role of intuition in decision-making? Which lived situations do we choose to extend and be more alert to, before we even start to quantify experiences? What does selective attention tell us about observation and knowing?
We will produce an artist book and a four-episode podcast as we refine the structure of our inquiry, visit with brain labs, and consider the meanings of pictures, sounds, and the contact sources of “world.”
From Forces To Forms Lab
Sirovich Family Resident – Ellen K. Levy
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Mark Rosin & Nick Battis
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The Department of Exhibitions at Pratt Institute will engage invited guests to Pratt Manhattan Gallery with workshops conducted in the gallery. Scheduled for March 2021, “The Forces to Forms Lab” will be part of an exhibition curated by Ellen K. Levy, and will be built into the exhibition. A series of nine workshops will take place in the gallery during the exhibition. The programming will be curated by Professor Mark Rosin and STEAMplant resident Ellen K. Levy, and will include artists in the exhibition and invited guest scientists. Encounters will be developed for small groups of high school students, college students, and the general
public.
Supporting these learning explorations, the exhibition titled From Forces to Forms will
investigate how artists and designers generate forms using experimental media and processes. It focuses on forms that result from principles of organismal development related to complex
systems and considers the implications of form generation in several different contexts.
Time traveling through ancient art, materials and technology
Sirovich Family Residents – Gary Cullen & Katelin Fallon
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Eleonora Del Federico & Diana Gisolfi
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The Unforeseen
Sirovich Family Resident – Pamela Breda
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Ágnes Mócsy & Ira Livingston
Click here for more Click HERE to visit the full project page.
Contesting Space: Envisioning Urban Futures Through Data and Virtual Reality
Sirovich Family Residents – Ayodamola Okunseinde, Salome Asega, Mala Kumar & Mariama Jalloh
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Caitlin Cahill & Daniel Wright
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Core of Me: A Hike-Play
Sirovich Family Resident – Jeremy Pickard
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Christopher X. J. Jensen & Jennifer Telesca
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Click HERE to visit the full project page.
Breath Consciousness
Sirovich Family Residents – Jasmine Grace & Ayodamola Okunseinde
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Charles Rubenstein & Che-Wei Wang
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Click HERE to visit the full project page.
Light, Color, and Science: Licio Isolani Sculptures from the 1960s
Sirovich Family Resident – Renato Miracco
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Eleonora Del Federico & Lisa A. Banner
STEAMplant Professional Collaborators – Sarah Nunberg
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Click HERE to visit the full project page.
Song Searching
Sirovich Family Student Fellow – Ami Cai
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Christopher X. J. Jensen, Basem Aly & Jennifer Telesca
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Higgins Hall Thermal Comfort Study
Sirovich Family Student Fellow – Nathan Bataille
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Gabrielle Brainard, Cristobal Correa, Jessie Braden & Daniel Wright
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Metric Units for the Solar System
Sirovich Family Resident – Sara Morawetz
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Mark Rosin & Joseph Morris
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Metric Units for the Solar System is an exploration of our relationship with the systems of ‘standardized units’ we have created to order society; examining the various tensions implicit in the function, perception and ultimately arbitrary construction of such formalisms. Extrapolating the original rationale for our own system of metric units, a new set of ‘natural measures’ will be constructed for each planetary body in our solar system.
Click HERE to visit the full project page.
Space Within Spaces
Sirovich Family Resident – Joseph Morris
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Ágnes Mócsy & Che-Wei Wang
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Joseph Morris’s STEAMplant residency collaboration with theoretical nuclear physicist Professor Ágnes Mócsy and designer/architect/artist Che-Wei Wang is an outdoor, public art installation that will interact with incoming cosmic rays. Using muon particle detectors, which sense the effect of interstellar cosmic rays, the sensors will be mounted on the rooftop of Pratt Institute’s Juliana Curran Terian Design Center detecting stellar rays.
Click HERE to visit the full project page.
Licio Isolani Study Archive
Sirovich Family Graduate Fellow – Miriam Clayton
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Cindie Kehlet & Lisa A. Banner
STEAMplant Professional Collaborator – Sarah Nunberg
Click here for more Italian artist and former Pratt Professor Licio Isolani (1931-2015) donated a collection of his work to the Department of Mathematics and Science before he passed away in 2015. This bequest was celebrated with the exhibition “A Strange Road of Materials” showcasing Isolani’s early sculptures and paintings. The Licio Isolani Study Archive at Pratt Institute was founded by Chair of the Math and Science Department Dr. Carole Sirovich and faculty member Dr. Cindie Kehlet, along with Dr. Lisa A. Banner, of the History of Art & Design Department, and Pratt’s Stockman Fellow Conservator Sarah Nunberg. Click HERE to visit the full project page.
Poetics of Our Universe
Sirovich Family Graduate Fellow – Adriana Green
STEAMplant Faculty Members – Ariel Goldberg, Daniel Wright & Christopher X. J. Jensen
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In 2015, Adriana Green began developing a poetic manuscript excavating her personal history alongside institutional archival information about America’s reliance on the Atlantic slave trade. Her work asked the questions: As Black Americans, how can we engage with our history when that history is obscured or lost? What are the elements of an hauntological pedagogy? Can silence act as a language? As a writer, Green is interested in how knowledge is translated into language. Specifically, how do we talk about the unknown? Through epistemological conversations with physicist, Dan Wright, she further explored what it means to put language around dense, astronomical concepts, such as black holes. By examining the parallels in how we wrestle dense concepts into language, Green explores how language holds complex and traumatic histories. Her project also interrogated he realm of photography and she worked with artist and scholar, Ariel Goldberg, in discussing the role of photography in archival representations of the Black community. Asking, How does photography works as both a static and dynamic record of the past? What would it mean to trouble the notions of objectivity and subjectivity in an image?
