The Incubator – John Harrison

The Incubator is an art piece which was initially installed as part of TechArtICT’s Dreamgrass installation at Exploration Place Fall 2022. Within the installation it was the machine where faceless children were created and indoctrinated.

The Incubator. Dreamgrass@Exploration Place, Fall 2022

A Center TV displayed a teleprompter which offered encouragement for viewers to become participants, reading into a microphone placed at center stage. Two TVs on either side of a teleprompter documented in realtime the indoctrination process the viewers unwittingly participated in. Jagged lines from the two side TVs morphed into the image a child.

Touch #1

In 2012 I created my first interactive touch wall: Touch #1. The work built on my experience creating the visuals for Still Life and was largely inspired by seeing autistic children experiencing pure joy while interacting in an immersive environment. Touch #1 received a great response and was later installed at Exploration Place and at…

TV Mountain

TV Mountain is an art piece which was initially installed as part of TechArtICT’s Dreamgrass installation at Exploration Place Fall 2022. It consisted of 12 TVs at various angles and orientations, together forming a jumbotron. As part of Dreamgrass, it subjected faceless child-like objects to a litany of 80s commercials. The working remote enjoyed a…

Digital Puppetry

I worked with a team of colleagues, community members, and urban youth. Our intention was to help the youth learn in a playful environment, find personal self-expression, and have their voices heard by communities in Boston. To do this, we adapted commercially available technology to provide a unique medium: digital puppetry.

SoundScratch

SoundScratch is a set of extensions I wrote to manipulate audio in a children’s programming language called Scratch. The environment emphasizes the expressive capabilities of sound through the act of creation and design.

TechArtICT: Dreamgrass

In Fall 2022, TechArtICT installed Dreamgrass at Exploration Place. The installation was presented as part of the Tallgrass Film Festival. Dreamgrass described a dystopian world where a corporate conglomerate called Happy Corp proudly demonstrated its aggressive use of 80s technology to pacify children. Dreamgrass featured Wichita artists Ernie Kind, Tom McGuire, Kyra Rubinstein, Pankaja Withanachchi,…

Chord Recognition in Beatles Songs

I worked with VÃctor AdÃ¡n to explore how if we might train a machine to recognize chords changes in music. We tried multiple models to solve the problem, including Support Vector Machines, Neural Networks, Hidden Markov Models, and a few variations of Maximum Likelihood systems.

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