Casa de Pandora is a fully functional Geolocation Application developed for a real cat. Using Arduino technology and several customized sensors, Casa de Pandora allows a better communication between a cat and its owner.
Pandora, an ordinary cat from São Paulo, Brazil, is the first pet to use this technology.
This application works in two different digital levels. In one, it maps the whole area of Pandora's house, identifying different rooms and recognizing her unique presence around the space. As she moves around the apartment, strategically located sensors send information online to her owner, and he can know exactly where she is, while he is gone.
Besides that, a fancy interface with infographics will also show how often she is eating, drinking, using her sandbox, and how the weather is around the apartment; even how many lives she has left. The program will also emit an alert to remind her owner to buy more food when it is about to finish.
But that is not all, using A.L.I.C.E. technology, Pandora herself can tweet to the world.
All the mapping and recognition of behavior patterns, habits and reactions are registered and crossed into a twitter profile, which constructs her nosy self and posts her adventures during the day. Phrases related to her action and location can be randomly selected from a database and posted on Twitter, making this owner-pet interaction even more entertaining.
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Arduino, Custom Electronics, Custom Software.
New York - 2011
Inspired by the Glitch Movement, Justinti.me was created for the 'Glitch Art 0P3NR3P0 Share Fest' at the The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
"Just in Time" is a digital clock that is constantly evolving and affected by algorithms. Every second brings a new possibility of causes, effects and reactions. This clock draws a parallel with our own existence in time: how little control we have over time itself, and how much we manage to influence the time in our lives. It is a metaphor for how our decisions are affected for the time we have left also the opportunities that it bring to us.
We tend to see time as a linear string of seconds. But time is not linear. It's irregular. It's a glitch. It's affected by how we absorb it, by what we do with it, by our daily decisions. The hours we spend on the Internet flies, as well as the time with the ones that we love. However, time drags forever while waiting in a long bathroom line.
* justinti.me is a collaboration with Bruna Calheiros.
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HTML5, Javascript.
New York - 2012
Backslash is a guerrilla kit for protests of the future.
Modern protesters believe connectivity is a basic human right. Backslash addresses the relationship between protests and technology, cultivating dialog about freedom of expression, riots and disruptive tech.
The future of technology in protest looks dark. The hyper-militarization of law enforcement has become widespread as global governments attempt to suppress dissent and monitor their citizens. There is a huge disparity between the amount of technologies used by the authorities and the technologies available to protesters and activists during protests and riots.
How can the global community retain the right to free speech and public assembly in a safe and effective manner? How can we level the technological playing field for activists and the general population? In protests of the future, how will the underground fight back?
As designers, we find this to be a very compelling challenge. We are interested in the technologies that could help to start this conversation.
Backslash is a series of functional devices designed for protests and riots of the future. Created through the lens of critical design, Backslash aims to retain the right to connect in protest sites through disruptive innovation and the creative appropriation of existing technologies. The devices range from a smart bandana for embedding hidden messages to personal blackbox devices that can backup your photos in case your phone is broken or confiscated.
* Backslash is a collaboration with Xuedi Chen.
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Custom electronics, 3D printed enclosures, Aluminum, Vacuum Formed Plastic, Laser Cut Acrylic, Custom Printed Fabric.
New York - 2015
“K7” (Portuguese for ca-ssette) is a series of unique audio cassette sculptures which play generative music composed entirely from one line of code. The sculptures are comprised of numerous homemade circuit boards, LED lights and motors, each functioning as a unique physical representation of a digital musical programming language.
The set of sculptures comprise of a large deck and two individual tapes suspended inside glass vitrines reference both fetishized sleek apple products and museum artifacts of natural history. Although they appear in physical form to be familiar audio cassettes, these digital sculptures are actually living algorithms generating ever changing compositions. They seek to question our changing relationship to the digital media we consume. Do we consume digital content or does it consume us?
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Machined Aluminum, Wood, Acrylic, 3D printed Resin, Glass, Stainless Steel, Automotive Paint, Custom Electronics.
New York - 2016
Atomo is a well established visual effects studio in Sao Paulo, Brazil whose high profile clients include Avon, Unilever, Coca-Cola and Smirnoff. Founded in 2008, Atomo specializes in post production and computer graphics for advertising, film and TV. In 2013 the head of Atomo approached Pedro and asked him to conceptualize a new multimedia interface and motion graphics intro for their show reel.
Atomo, in Portuguese, translates to “atom”, a particle, a piece, a fragment. With this concept in mind, Pedro developed detailed imagery and particle effects using generative components, particle effects and fluid dynamics that is representative of the brand and at the same time demonstrates the breadth of their technical capabilities.
In today's data-driven society, individuals carrying smartphones and interacting with social media networks have agreed, often without conscious consideration, to policies that grant service providers explicit rights to harvest and utilize personal data on a massive scale. These include companies like Google and Facebook that offer "free" services for a value exchange of our data.
There currently exists a paradox in our internet culture. As a generation, we are simultaneously obsessed with publicity and privacy. While we publish and post details about our lives online, at the same time we demand the most advanced privacy protection software. An unprecedented degree of potential exposure comes with the current mode of existence.
We have ceded control of our data emissions and based on activity logs, Google clearly knows where we are, where we've been and possibly even where we're going. Yet when I wanted a log of my location history, I had to go through numerous steps to “enable” tracking...
By participating in this hyper-connected society while having little to no control of my digital data production, how much of myself do I unknowingly reveal? To what degree does the aggregated metadata collected from me paint an accurate portrait of who I am as a person? What aspects of my individuality are reflected in this portrait?
x.pose is an exploration of these questions. Since we have already ceded control of our digital data emissions, x.pose goes a step further to broadcast the wearer's data for anyone and everyone to see.
* x.pose is a collaboration with Xuedi Chen.
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3D Printed Flexible Polymer, Electrochromic Film, Fabric, Custom Electronics.
New York - 2014
We humans are surrounded by data that we are constantly consuming and producing everyday, even by doing the most routine tasks like going to work or getting a coffee. At a glance, these data can seem unremarkable or mundane, but when you acquire a large enough set of data and dig a little deeper, trends and patterns begin to emerge, revealing an ever evolving story.
Pingado is a mixed media data project focusing on an individual’s consumption of coffee. I developed a mobile app interface that allows a user to record his/her caffeine consumption by noting time, amount, frequency, and type. The data is fed through a custom algorithm to generate a personalized 3D form that is a physical representation of the individual’s caffeine consumption. The finished 3D form, shaped like a coffee mug, was then 3D printed and fired in porcelain, creating a fully functioning coffee mug that the individual can use to maintain their caffeine habits.
As an extension to this project I could imagine adding to the dataset more information about country of origin, sustainability and fair trade conditions as a reminder of our social impact from simply drinking a cup of coffee.
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3D Printed Porcelain Ceramic, Custom Software.
New York - 2014
How aware are you of your digital footprint? Have you ever imagined living in a Big Brother Society where someone is reading and analyzing every word you type?
Ghost Writer is a data sculpture and social experiment that utilizes and flips the image of a keyboard from being an input interface, to a display, an output.
Ghost Writer invites the spectator to become a data-voyeur, peeping at thousands of lines of chat messages being typed back in real-time at the keyboard. Instead of being explicit, and simply applying an algorithm for text analysis and data visualization, it presents the corpus of the text in a performative way, with subtitles that can only be perceived by an attentive observer.
The data for this project was collected during the period of 2 years, and displayed using openframeworks.
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Aluminum, Wood, Acrylic, Custom Electronics.
New York - 2014
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Design 3.0 is a series of three code-generated posters that is inspired by the Swiss school of graphic design and translated to “The New Aesthetic”. Design 3.0 is an attempt to bring the open-source philosophy to generative art in a tangible and offline way.
The generative posters are embedded with the source code that was used to produce the design, embracing the lines of code into the final forms of the design. Using a UV light, the audience is able to uncover and access the source code juxtaposed with the designs it generated.
These posters challenges the relationship between artwork and viewer by bringing transparency to the creative process and they aim to be physical representations of Form and Content.
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Javascript, Screenprinting, Acrylic Ink and UV Pigment.
New York - 2012
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