CAPSTONE PROJECTSBXA seniors are required to complete the BXA Capstone Project. The goal of the capstone project is to give a student the opportunity to weave together the interdisciplinary elements of their curricula into an integrated project. The creation and completion of such a project can be an important integrative and fulfilling capstone for students. These projects have included thesis papers, outreach projects, poetry readings, musical and dramatic performances, and visual art exhibitions.
For more information on how to register for the BXA Capstone Project courses, contact Stephanie Murray, msmurray@andrew.cmu.edu. Forms are available in the Solar Decathlon House or download (PDF). BXA Capstone Project Highlights
Madeleine Barnes
Amelia Cessna
Michael Chait
Tome Efrati-Saidon
Francesca Fenzi
Benjamin Howe
Robert Kotcher
Samuel Lavery
Daniel Lipson
Julie Mallis
Sarah Murcek
Ju Young Park
Maria Raffaele
Megan Ratliff
Timothy Sherman
Meagan Trott
Alexandra Wolfe
Samantha Zucker This project is a digital time motion piece that explains the theory of Linguistic Relativity, the idea that language influences thought process, in an approachable and accessible manner.
Melissa Acosta
M. Callen
Anthony Catania
Robyn Gray
Sarah Habib
Stephanie Huang
Laura Paoletti
Heejin Park
Alia Poonawala
Kristen Staab
Katherine Chin Shannon Deep Xiaoyuan Jiang
Ana Kim Hyun Jeong (Helen) Kim Tina Li
Graham Swindoll Emily Lee |
This project is an investigation into how to use art and artistic means as a creative vehicle to deal with and overcome grief. It consists of artistic inquiry, production, and psychological research
This project puts a modern twist on the ancient process of illuminating manuscripts by combining traditional techniques from the Golden Age of Illumination with digital media and performance. It aims to integrate the warmth and intimacy of an
Two Latin American youth orchestra foundations that promote social change, one in Venezuela and the other in Chile, are studied for impact on community social participation. Analyses of difference between the musical programs, along with the cultural and socio-economic landscape of each nation, investigate how each program contributes to social change and community participation.
This project examines how the brain processes music listening, performance, and composition. Better understanding how music is processed can ultimately provide insight into individual motives, fears, desires, memories, and communication methods.
There is a tendency in the study of history and society to write off popular comedy as culturally lacking and unimportant. This project demonstrates how the television show Arrested Development encapsulated the popular culture and political climate of its era (2003-2006) through the use of clever references and comedic “easter eggs.” Including video, graphic, and written components, this exhibit promotes historical discovery through entertainment.
Galactic, biological abstract drawings explore the spontaneity of art before the development of representational art. A scribble of an unknown abstract form can be nearly any trace left by a drawing implement that is un-interpretable by anyone other than the scribbler. Scribbles presumably provide the basis upon which a child will build artistic skills and such a basis is necessary for later development. These drawings explore this early developmental stage and how the developmental spontaneity of a scribble stays with a person forever.
The Cyert Outdoor Studio Project is a collaborative design and construction effort with the Cyert Center for Early Education to produce a functional outdoor learning space that will be used to promote student creativity and foster tactile learning.
This exhibit is designed to enable crowd-sourced ideation and cross-culture interaction between students and experts from a variety of academic fields. The subject of colour is a case study for the hypothesis that utilizing intrinsically interdisciplinary topics to start conversations will assist in breaking down disciplinary barriers that prohibit potential innovation.
The Magnetic Wooden Unit Block System is designed to foster collaboration and be a fun way to teach children about concepts such as magnetic poles, attraction, repulsion, and magnetic fields while adhering to the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Kindergarten Standards. A psychology experiment was conducted with four- to six-year-old children at the Carnegie Mellon Children’s School involving all the children receiving a teacher lesson on magnetism followed by a 15-minute opportunity to play with either Modular Mighty Magz or a common magnet toy, specifically Mega Magz. Though all the children learned from the lesson, those who interacted with the Modular Mighty Magz learned and collaborated more. This result means that this toy has the potential to be used in schools, museums, or homes across the country for improved learning on teaching concepts about magnets.
Variance between two sequences is often determined using some form of dynamic programming. The atomic relevance model proposes an alternative method for computing relevance of individual elements in a given “context” by assigning each with a corresponding relevance score. The technique can be applied in several situations, from music and poetry to biological sequence alignments.
This project uses mobile technology to recreate the Homestead Steelworks, an iconic but demolished symbol of Pittsburgh’s past. By making historic photographs and videos available to visitors at the site, this project helps explain the steel-making process while also illuminating the cultural significance of steel in 20th century America. Augmented reality is used to overlay 3D models of the lost mills and blast furnaces onto a laptop viewfinder, giving visitors a better sense of the size and scale of the industry that once dominated this region.
The Bridge Magazine is a blueprint for a campus-wide video game publication that transcends disciplines with the shared interest of video games. Its main goal is to act as a voice for students interested in making and playing games and to receive information about opportunities ranging from those on campus to those in the global gaming community.
Synesthesia refers to the interconnection of sensory stimuli, a phenomenon by which a sensory perception may respond to stimuli received by other senses. This project seeks to capture the perceptional alterations encountered throughout daily life, which consequently impact personal interactions with and understandings of the semantics of the world. The video is projected into a 6-foot pentagonal pyramid of mirrored Plexiglas that reproduces these stimuli in an illusory, recursive manner. The viewer must then navigate through the ensuing phantasm and consider his or her own perceptual understandings.
This project sought to create an approach for performers tackling complex characters, particularly those who, in modern times, would have a mental health diagnosis. It also laid the groundwork for future research in pairing troubled characters with similarly troubled individuals for therapeutic effect.
The purpose of ColorCalendar is to visualize human emotions utilizing technology and colors. It is an online interface where users can choose three different colors corresponding to their daily moods. ColorCalendar collects daily colors as a new form of
In classical music today, the specialized fields of early music and new/contemporary music are the only true growth industries, the areas of the profession where innovation has been ongoing, and worries about extinction are the last thing on most musicians’ minds. In order to investigate this continuing success, the researcher analyzed the rhetoric of a number of leading professionals and ensembles in early music, and then programmed, designed, organized, and performed a series of innovative and exploratory early music concert performances.
The body and sky are universal social fields in which patterning through tattooing and asterisms create ideologically imbued patterns. Communal stories are projected into the stars for general recognition and onto the body as personal identification exemplify worldviews. The Japanese and Maori confer with these expressive modes in very different ways, and in doing so solidify their core beliefs.
Alternate Reality Games are large-scale cooperative games in which players solve puzzles in both real and virtual space. This project consisted of designing, creating, and producing a three week long Alternate Reality Game on the Carnegie Mellon campus, in which players worked together to halt a program which, upon completion, would bring the world to an end.
Our culture is a tug-of-war between spiritual extremes. This project is about searching for a “middle ground” in the works of Goethe, Hesse, and Rilke. The end product synthesizes text from these authors with original imagery in the form of a hand-bound book.
PRO is an investigation into which fashion elements women find most empowering, with the end goal of translating anthropological research into the design and fabrication of ensembles expressing strength, power, and true agency. From interviews and discussions with women from different walks of life in Pittsburgh, PA and Florence, Italy, there emerges distinct opinions and frustrations with fashion as an industry and as a social medium. This analysis leads to a better understanding of the inherent flaws in mass-produced fashion, high-end branding, and the flawed ways society looks at women.
In this fashion line, each piece is highly tailored to the individual while still retaining the cohesive look of a collection and a recognizable style of the designer. This is achieved through the creation of software that takes input from the user and combines it with algorithms common to computer vision, computational photography, and generative systems to create the patterns and then construct the final garment using a combination of digital fabrication, generative textile production, and more traditional techniques.
Refugees arrive with little cultural and linguistic preparation to life in America. This project consists of a learning platform that empowers refugees to gain essential English communication skills and leverages the knowledge of volunteer tutors. The system consists of a web interface that allows tutors to rapidly create content for the iPod so refugees can download the lessons and practice them during the week.
This project consists of a simple message temporarily installed and photographed at various locations throughout Pittsburgh and its environs. The message, glowing in neon, SOMEONE IS ALWAYS HERE, talks about both presence and absence. Depending on context, the message can be literal or metaphorical.
Through the loss of community, narrow agendas, and a blatant rejection of the past, the design of the built environment after World War II is neither socially, environmentally, nor economically sustainable. This composition proposes a theory for thinking about future growth—one with a premise of continuity and coherence, not isolation and rejection.
This animation is a short focusing on the beginning and end of a relationship between the two main characters. Their relationship is illustrated (literally) through the actions of their hearts rather than their own actions or words. The animation is an experiment in mixing digital and traditional media to create a unique aesthetic.
This project employs text and the abstraction of letter forms to create a universal image, attempting to elicit the words’ meanings from the image made. This piece is meant to be a small gesture to erase language barriers: the borders between those who understand and those who do not.
This project develops a branding system for an imaginary Audrey Hepburn film festival. The goal is to modernize the appeal of the classic films of Audrey Hepburn for a contemporary audience and features the program’s festival identity, program booklet, and promotional posters, as well as a series of contextual renderings of the campaign applied in a cityscape.
This super-hero-fairytale is an animation set in the 1950s, a time when gender roles were strictly enforced. A decade after the war, a sixty year old woman with the ability to work power tools, as well as having the experience of knitting countless numbers of socks for the troops overseas, takes up her knitting needles and welding torch once again when her home town is in danger of an alien invasion.
The arts in the United States need to receive some form of government funding on the national, regional, and local level. The arts cannot survive, especially in the current economic climate, without a base subsidy. This composition demonstrates how and why federal and local funding can benefit creativity when made available across disciplines and media.
This project demonstrates Greek culture and educates about its cooking traditions (the passing down of ancestral recipes, family-style eating) and food sciences (the process of curing olives, a diet based on the land, etc.). Food is used as a medium because it is rich with meaning. It can represent whole cultures and their history, families and their recipes, and the natural resources of a country made edible by sophisticated processes. This endows food with the power as an effective medium to educate.
This project addresses the nature of our recording of time and events. Our systematic organization of such data into blocks (i.e. today) renders them analogous, even identical. With this distancing from actual events and the subsequent categorical documentation thereof, we forget the specificity of the present as it becomes the past. What we are left with is the evidence of time: static, monochrome, textual fragmentation.
In our dreams, our unconscious selves can express desires and fears that are normally disguised from our conscious lives. I will use the practice of lucid dreaming to explore the spaces and buildings that are depicted in my dreams to find deeper and hidden connections to my own self. These spaces and emotions will then be depicted in a series of pinhole photographs.
Deliberative Theater is a performance-based event designed to spark debate and discussion about a chosen topic. Participants watch a short piece of theater about the topic, and afterward are led through small and large group discussions and a panel about the issue, and offer proposed solutions.
A digital art program that applies a Boid-like flocking algorithm to the paintbrushes to create a unique trailing effect from the brushes’ movement.
The human body has been the subject of artistic inquiries since the dawn of human history. Drawing and painting the human body allows artists to understand its structure and surface and to interpret it as a vessel and actor of human experience and desire. Such interpretions result from the arst’s own bias or perspective as well as what the viewer brings. I started exploring the grotesque, uncanny and the abstract potential of the human body. I emphasized such aspects by distorting the human form and our point of view. The distortion was not invented, but actual. While I was painting, I found a common thread among my paintings,
This project examines different ways in which people relate emotions to music. Through this study of the relationship of music and emotion, I hope to discover some correlations between them.
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