Paper Bark" is an experimental film and VR experience about colonization, collapse, and rebirth.It uses generative algorithms, photogrammetry, and image style transfer to reconstruct the past and show potential futures.In the 1990s, the Maine paper industry collapsed leaving mill towns without their primary industry.The focus of "Paper Bark" is the remnants of a 130-year-old mill in Winslow, Maine.The title of the work refers to the bark of paper birches, a plant native to Maine, which has historically been used to make canoes, baskets, and other goods."Paper Bark" tells a cyclical story of deterioration, decolonization, and the possible futures of a paper mill town.More information about the work can be found on the artwork's website: http://projectiveplanes.com/paperbark/.

Non-Linguistic Utterances (NLUs) are essential parts of emotive exchanges, not only in human-human interactions but also in the context of human-robot interactions. This research aims to deepen our understanding of emotive sounds for the domain of human-robot exchanges. We investigated the connections between certain audio qualities and the perception of emotional arousal and pleasure, designing a novel mapping of musical and prosodic audio parameters to a dimensional model of emotion which allows a robot to express a range of emotions. To assess the emotive sounds, we conducted an end-user evaluation in which participants were asked to interpret the emotive NLUs conveyed by robots. In the evaluation we examined 4 archetypal emotions: excitement, contentment, sadness, and anger. We placed participants' responses within the pleasure-arousal affect grid to analyze the distinctiveness of the emotive sounds. The study revealed that participants consistently associated excited, sad and angry NLUs with significantly different emotional states but did not do so for content NLUs. These findings contribute valuable insights into how to design NLUs which can enhance the emotional depth of human-robot interactions, with potential applications across various domains.

Come Hither to Me! is feminist robot theater with the objective to break down gender roles and provoke the audience to question accepted norms and stereotypes. Inspired by pick-up artist strategies, the female robotic performer wanders the art gallery and initiates conversation with an audience member using an exaggerated flirtatious comment, followed by a series of compliments, negs (backward compliments), humorous remarks, and both personal and general questions. The conversation design engages the participant in a performative, entertaining interaction with the robot, so she can gain information about the audience member and use it to ultimately ask them out on a date. The objective of the interactions is not only to make the participant laugh and engage but also to make them slightly uncomfortable in order to provoke thoughts and bring attention to one's gendered expectations in normalized sexist societal structures. This critical, yet humorous, robotic performance exemplifies how social justice-oriented design, critical computing, camp aesthetics, and theater staging techniques can be applied to human-robot interaction for social/gender studies, digital performance, and robotic research.

Robots are often envisaged as embodied agents that might be able to intelligently and expressively communicate with humans. This could be due to their physical embodiment, their animated nature, or to other factors, such as cultural associations. In this study, we investigated emotional responses of humans to affective non-linguistic utterances produced by an embodied agent, with special attention to the way that these responses depended on the nature of the embodiment and the extent to which the robot actively moved in proximity to the human. To this end, we developed a new singing robot platform, ROVER, that could interact with humans in its surroundings. We used affective sound design methods to endow ROVER with the ability to communicate through song, via musical, non-linguistic utterances that could, as we demonstrate, evoke emotional responses in humans. We indeed found that the embodiment of the computational agent had an affect on emotional responses. However, contrary to our expectations, we found singing computers to be more emotionally arousing than singing robots. Whether the robot moved or not did not affect arousal. The results may have implications for the design of affective non-speech audio displays for human-computer or human-robot interaction.

This research project is based on 32 years of Kuchera-Morin's research and practice in spatio-temporal music composition and media arts. The project is an immersive interactive visual, sonic computational instrument presented as an installation, which includes the development of an open-source computational language, and Kuchera-Morin's immersive interactive visual/sonic composition PROBABLY/POSSIBLY? Using the mathematics of quantum mechanics, the immersive instrument and computational language facilitates the creation of new, unique visual/sonic art forms. This project allows the artist to drive scientific and technological research for creative expression. This same technology is giving physicists insight into higher dimensional representation. The immersive visual/sonic instrument and language is based on the time-dependent Schrödinger equation splitting a hydrogen-like atom's electron in superposition in various orbitals. The immersive media composition, PROBABLY/POSSIBLY? can be interactively performed using our multimodal computational platform and open source language. The instrument/installation can also be used to compose and perform a number of art works based on the time-dependent Schrödinger equation