Here are the winners of the 2017 Henry Armero Award:
Neighborhood Pen Pals
Elizabeth Agyemang – BFA, Art with an additional major in Professional Writing
In Neighborhood Pen Pals, personal narratives are the bridge between community engagement and social activism. The piece exists in the form of a subscription box and a pen pal letter campaign, wherein weekly letters, prompts, and prints, invite participants to engage with their community. Through printmaking and letter writing, Neighborhood Pen Pals seeks to mend the discord between online discourse and corporeal communication.
Nick Castellana – BCSA, Computer Science and Music Performance
Valerie Senavsky – BSA, Chemistry and Music Performance with a minor in English
Gowri Sunder – BHA, Psychology and Art
Theodore Teichman – BSA, Neurobiology and Music Composition
Dreams are a space of great intimacy but also an accessible way of sharing fears, love, and wonder for the world. REM Walks is a social practice piece that uses virtual reality, installation, and sound recordings to give rise to an experience where the audience is allowed to explore social exchange and creation. The virtual reality program will allow viewers to collectively interpret dream narratives collected from the Pittsburgh community drawing and sound generation by a sequential interpretation of a dream, wherein the audience gets to place the next viewer into an immersive space of their imaginations. Through this virtuality reality installation, viewers will have the ability to peek into the beauty of private worlds of those in our community.
Robot Parody Movies
John Choi – BCSA, Computer Science and Art
Filmmaking and robotics are inherently multidisciplinary endeavors. Producing a film requires the efforts of writers, artists, and producers alike. Building a robot requires the collaboration of electrical, mechanical, and software engineers. What happens when the two worlds get mashed together? We get advanced humanoid robot movie actors starring in a series of short films parodying famous movies along the likes of Harry Botter, Saving Private Robot, and Fortran Gump. With Robot Parody Movies, the line between artist and engineer becomes so blurred that there is literally no distinction between producing creative art and building creative invention.
Wick
Luca Damasco – BCSA, Computer Science and Art
Zachary Rispoli – BFA, Art
Wick is a free browser-based toolkit for creating interactive things for the internet. With Wick, you can create games, animations, and everything in between. Your creations can run on any device with a web browser—that means mobile too. And since Wick lives in the browser, you don’t have to download any extra software to use it!
Kabir Mantha – BSA, Mathematical Sciences and Music Technology with a minor in Sound Design A May 2017 production of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle aims to radically reenvision a traditional opera to gain new perspectives on the work itself as well as the archetype of an operatic experience. This production transforms the music of Bartók with the immateriality of acousmatic performance to create an immersive electroacoustic experience. To achieve this, we subvert the traditional opera house listening paradigm by using a combination of live and prerecorded instrumental parts spatialized using a multichannel surround sound system in an intimate black box theater.
Movin’ With Kira
Kira Melville – BFA, Art with a minor in Environmental Studies
Movin’ with Kira is a mobile, human-powered, dj protest float, a feminist chitty-chitty-bang-bang for political and social engagement.