The Media-Design Practices thesis project develops over the course of a year.

The final project rarely resembles early concepts and ideas.

Here are some of the steps I took along the way:

Working up to my thesis-midterm I was interested in "Black Box" systems. As part of that fascination I started dissecting and developing a extreme use case for interacting with one. The project was called APIS - the name was a reference to APIS an Egyptian deity that took the form of a bull serving as an "intermediary between humans and an all-powerful god" and API (Application Programming Interface).

Part of my midterm display.

To build out this system I worked a fair amount with IBM's sentiment analysis API and voice recognition systems. As well as dissecting and re-engineering a Scientology e-meter.

An original e-meter movement found in a used electronics shop in the valley.

The initial circuit designs came from a CMU graduate student who "spent nearly 10 years in the Sea Org from 1972 - 1982 .... repaired E-meters on board the Apollo and at the FLB ... trained as an auditor up to Cl V at the FLB .... audited many thousand hours at NOTs"

Pretty exciting stuff...

I redesigned the boards to connect to an Aruduino so the signals could be fed in to the APIS computer program.

Milling on an Othermill.

After the midterm the project transitioned to a forward look at interaction with the system (or algorithm).

To do so I spent time working with machine learning and search systems as well as developing a language for talking about them.

Work-shopping visualizing machine learning methodologies

Systems mapping

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