Every Thing Computer

iwanttogotothemall.com is a web browser game interpreting the American shopping mall as a symbol for the US-Mexico border. The internet, the shopping mall, and the border become one: a focal point for surveillance, assimilation, and imperialism, covertly achieved through cute aesthetics. Inspired by the virtual world tie-ins of mall chains like Build-a-Bear-Workshop, this object is a warning for my younger self. Through gaudy games, I tell her going to "the mall" is a bad idea.

Find My Friend is a pair of compasses that have been wired to point its arrow not towards north, but toward its other half.

Using GPS outdoors, and UWB indoors, the compasses share their coordinates, and calculating a bearing in relation to its partner coordinate for a stepper motor, connected to an arrow.

Our modern navigation devices have atrophied not only our sense of how get somewhere, but also sense of where we should go and why. Instead of navigating towards an endpoint, this work, and its accompanying documentation presents and asks how it would feel if we could only orient ourselves towards the person that can make any place meaningful.

Our devices hold more and more of humanity’s knowledge and yet less and less humanity. Is the world becoming nothing but disembodied limbs holding cell phones?

The Soft Computer Mini is a portable, laptop-sized textile computer that treats computing as craft. Touch the felt flower trackpad to wake it, press one of six mood keys (care, dream, craft, code, bloom, void), then the machine-knit space bar, and the e-ink screen composes a one-of-a-kind tarot card, one of about 39,000. A travel-sized extension of The Soft Computer, it draws on computational poetics and alternative interfaces to challenge optimization and turn interaction into ritual.

My computer has been my closest; it may know me better than anyone. It knows me by heart. This soft silicone screen asks for no typing or tapping, only your pulse. Put your finger on the sensor and each heartbeat lights up one pixel, slowly tracing the shape of a heart, The piece makes visible the quiet trust we place in our devices: we hand them our softest, most involuntary selves, and they redisplay us, tenderly and in public.

Tallygotchi reimagines the Japanese virtual pet Tamagotchi as an oversized handbag. The piece brings our emotional attachment to technology into a new context, blurring the line between technology and accessory. By turning an electronic toy into a fashion accessory, it raises a broader question about the role of technology in our lives: How can the devices we often see as practical tools also become expressions of our personality and identity?

For millennia, people have gathered around fire for comfort, ritual and remembrance. Hearth asks whether a computer could offer the same quiet presence. Its flame, simulated from real candle footage, lives inside a clear resin lantern and senses those around it, stirring when you approach or speak. Pick it up, carry it, blow it out, then shake it back to life. Could our oldest rituals inform how we interact with new technology?

This is an interactive stained glass MS paint sculpture, where people can draw and animate. Flutex glass physically pixelates the LED panel in the back, and is made traditionally with tiffany stained glass techniques. This exists as an impossible object housed in an old Macintosh. It juxtaposes handcraft, with hardware and software, existing in a liminal space.

NaRa (short for narrative) explores what AI might look like when it behaves less like an authoritative answer engine and more like a carefully restrained self-reflection object, one that supports people in thinking without taking ownership of their thoughts.

NaRa does not ask users to choose between using AI and rejecting it.The problem is not that AI may be wrong. It is that a confident response can prematurely close down ambiguity, reduce critical reflection, and weaken the user’s sense of authorship over decisions that should remain personally theirs.

See more at: nara-ai.netlify.app

thinking of u invites participants to place their phone beneath a glass cloche and briefly surrender control. As the familiar device begins to act on its own beyond its owner’s reach, the relationships it holds become a source of anticipation and uncertainty. The participant’s decision to intervene—or simply do nothing—becomes part of the message. What unfolds beneath the glass may permanently alter the relationships beyond it.

An apparatus for coastal apparitions, this stone tells the tide. Behind its sea-glass window: the moon phase, the height of the water, and the tide either rising or falling at your selected beach. In Tampa Bay, low tide reveals the intertidal zone for shelling and exploring. High tide invites manatees, dolphins, and sharks, a time to snorkel, surf, or kayak. Tidestone, with its window to the outdoors, is a reminder to seize the moment while you have it. Free web version: tide.kateander.com

Three ThinkPad Yoga 11e laptops reborn as AC Blanks, running AC OS, the native operating system of Aesthetic.Computer, an online cultural network for upcycled hardware, where typing a word runs a program: a musical keyboard, a paint tool, a coding assistant. At the opening the MacNeoPolitan Trio, three singing MacBooks, performs from the plinths. For the finale each MacBook closes and the AC Blank beneath it boots, one by one. Then visitors can interact with the laptops and explore the OS.

Auto Wave Machine is a machine-learning-driven guitar effects pedal that uses computer vision to translate a musician’s body movements into real-time sound modulation. It creates a tremolo effect by dynamically controlling the guitar’s volume oscillation through physical gestures. By synchronizing sound with movement, it transforms the performer’s body into an expressive interface, exploring the evolving relationship between humans, machines, and creative expression.

Music and dance are deeply interconnected. While dance has traditionally followed the patterns, tempo, and style of music, the reverse relationship (i.e. using movement to generate or influence music) remains underexplored. Be the Beat is a boombox augmented with a camera and artificial intelligence that dynamically recommends music based on a dancer’s movements. The dancer dance first, then the music follows.

AI assistants today are often built to feel subservient. People model them as obedient, anthropomorphic, and always waiting for a command. The Stochastic Parrot takes a different stance. Instead of acting like a miniature human or a digital butler, it's designed as a non-human character: a physical, fuzzy, opinionated parrot with its own personality and agenda. It can wander with you on your shoulder, collect context from the world around you, and interject on its own terms. The relationship becomes more like living with a quirky roommate or a house pet that shares your space, notices things, and occasionally has something to say.

Forecasting Forecasts pairs a beeswax infant with an interactive screen. Viewers navigate eight factors that may influence decisions about having children, including financial instability, changing lifestyles, and the medicalization of reproduction. Selecting a factor opens related research. The work gives form to an imagined dialogue between a potential parent and their children. Gathering information becomes part of an attempt to prepare for an uncertain future. How much can research help someone feel ready to become a parent, and how much depends on the social and economic conditions in which they live?

(P)rose Garden replaces the traditional document-based word processor with a living garden of writings. With pinches over/on dirt, users select where to plant their prose. Instead of crawling from left to right, words then sprout and grow using real algorithms modelling plant growth into flowers, pine trees, and ferns. Ultimately, I hope to reimagine the word processor and computers more broadly not as arbiters of information but as nurseries where our thoughts can flourish in all their beauty.

This is a lamp. If you want to switch it on, you should braid its tassels. Our homes are filled with smart objects, yet our interactions with them stay funneled through a screen, reduced to taps and swipes designed for speed. This lamp requires the slow, unhurried, intentionally inefficient process of braiding. Tracing a tactile lineage of interface design back to textile crafts, it asks what new gestures might emerge when we touch our machines the way we touch cloth.

LIFEFORM is a living sculpture: a hand-sculpted ceramic shrine housing a computer that perpetually evolves artificial life. Each creature is written by an AI running entirely inside the sculpture, cast as light onto a glazed screen, and judged by a camera. The life is the light itself, projected into the glaze. The screen is not just a terminal but an environment, sustained by an endless loop of locally sourced tokens, clay and circuits.

SYNAPTICON treats cognition as an artistic medium. Through a live “Brain Waves -to- Natural Language -to- Aesthetics” system, it connects brain activity to foundation models, translating neural signals into language and immersive audiovisual experiences. Conceived as a cognitive Panopticon where biological and synthetic intelligence converge, the work explores creative alignment, human–AI co-creation, altered perception, mental privacy, and neurorights.

The piece “Pasture,” observes a group of digitally programmed horses run free in a coded field. Flowers grow, the baby horses eat them and grow up, they run, they die, they have children, their children grow up, and their cycles continue. The piece meditates on computing and the quiet harmony of cycling code. The life of the horses and their growth and death is a projection by us onto the computer and there’s a calmness that comes from watching that system and seeing ourselves.

Okay Computer turns its audience into a computer, manually generating a single image from a neural network by collectively completing tens of thousands of calculations by hand.

Instructions: One worksheet renders one pixel. Become a neuron. Join the hive mind. Do your part.

Perversion of Interfaces is a collection of objects that claim to be “smart,” but often fail, misbehave, or divert from human norms. These objects are a rough sketch of an alternative world where these products are produced. A camera that resists taking pictures, a smart light that longs for intimacy, or a prescription device that does face-reading. They are familiar, humorous, worrisome at times, and mostly confusing. This catalogue invites you to a world where “smart” becomes “perverse.”

Collection Curator: Shuang Cai
Design Advisor: Sang Leigh

*this is a collection of objects. In a google doc, I have created short blurb for each of them, with individual designers' names. It would be ideal to include them either after the description, or as a separate sheet next to it. Thank you!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p5J8ldxmX_-hqr2lw5UexE6Z9bhe8qW2SWBTjcVAgxg/edit?usp=sharing

ESC is a humorous, oversized physical "Escape" key that subverts our relationship with standard computer hardware. Normally used to exit digital states, this key resists interaction itself with an audible "OUCH!" whenever a user attempts to press it. By imbuing a mundane UI trope with a reluctant physical personality, ESC transforms a simple input into a playful, expressive dialogue between human and machine.

Many AI tools race to deliver finished answers. Prompted does the opposite: it responds only with oblique questions that invite slower, more reflective thinking. Drawing on divinatory and creative tools like the I Ching, tarot, Oblique Strategies, and the DEW Line deck, it gives users something to interpret in relation to their own situation. It treats AI as a tool to think with, not one that thinks for you. The work isn’t done when the system produces an output, but when the person makes meaning from it.

In 2020, I wanted to put the personal back into personal computers by designing fully functional computers in fun shapes and themes. I designed and built a frog computer for no othe reason than that I love frogs. It evolved into a whole frog desktop with matching keyboard (with custom keycaps I designed), deskmat, and chair.

Chair by Alice Lee in collaboration, deskmat designed by mogumu in collaboration, frog biking game, Around Town, is by Chloe Hansen/Toadstool Picnic.

“Ennoda” comes from the Tamil word meaning “mine”, and here takes the form of a pouch that asks you about your routine, and collects notes to form a catalog and develop suggestions to help you manage the beauty products you use. This piece was contrived after reflecting on the endorsement of overconsumption by the beauty industry, while being conscious of intrusive (ex: camera-enabled) detection and logging methods. The companion app is designed to reflect a personal diary-style journal, with product-specific notes and a dated notebook for chronicling findings from each day of use.

Lightboxes are programmable diffuse light-objects. They inherit the monolithic stillness and perceptual subtlety of Light & Space, and the dynamic aliveness of this era of computational intelligence. In “Lightboxes as Conversation 1”, two Lightboxes visualize the speech of two members of the audience as both an homage to the standard speech waveform visuals of newly quotidian voice transcription and an aesthetic yearning for more.

We asked people ages 4-95 to draw a computer, then answer yes or no to three questions drawn from Sherry Turkle's research who studied kids and computers in the 1980s. We ask is it alive, does it think, and does it have feelings. We catalogue the drawings the way Rhoda Kellogg, an educator who studied children’s art for decades, did. One wheel sorts by age, the other by how people answered. Thanks to Phoebe Hearst Preschool, our volunteers, and Berkeley’s senior homes.

Kinputer: A Labor of Love (prototype) is a touch-sensitive quilt combining kin (kinship) and computer. Bringing together ancestral and emerging technologies — sewing, appliqué, and microelectronics — it asks: how might we build a computer around the intimacy of a quilt? Wrapped in a family quilt, we're in close contact with material histories, family, and culture. Kinputer extends this felt knowledge (Dr. Laura Harjo) through an LCD screen, inviting visitors to explore Black quilting traditions through a touch-based quilt interface.

Drawing on improvisation and strip piecing in Black quilting and African textile traditions, I pieced the quilt intuitively, without a pattern. Its composition reflects Oklahoma’s fields and waterways seen from my airplane window heading back home. Denim and blue honor my grandfathers — a farmer and a mechanic — our family’s labor, and our tradition of catching catfish. Green and black reflect our land-based traditions, often taught by grandmothers. This piece is a stitched, feminist response to their labor of love.

"Computer" was once a job, until we all owned one. "Publisher" still is, but now anyone can post anywhere. We gained a public voice and became hostage to likes. This rotary phone from the last century may once have called in a story to a newspaper. With a micro computer and a printer, it becomes Publisher, the machine. No screen, no feed. Call in your piece; you decide if it runs in tomorrow's paper. Speak freely, create together, never check who liked it. Every thing computer. What's next?

Can we find poems in everyday items around us? The Poetry Kiosk is an interactive installation that transforms the familiar ritual of self-checkout into a poetic, playful encounter. Users scan an everyday product they bring, and rather than printing a price, the kiosk extracts the product's defining word and prints a human-written poem that contains it as a receipt.

Inter:Lace is an AI wearable that can physically punish its user. This work examines the notion of self-betterment technology in society as covert manipulation at scale.

"Inter:Lace isn’t just a fashion item—it’s your new social conscience. When you need just a little social optimization, it tightens gently around your neck, elevating your presence. Wear it to become the best version of you."

Ditto explores the negotiative relationship emerging between a smart tool and its user. It refuses to take a picture, disagreeing with the user at times, at a whim most other times.

Instruction: hold and point to shoot

"Ditto refuses mediocrity and makes decisions using our advanced creative AI. This camera knows the moment when you got the perfect scene in your viewfinder. Look for your “Ditto!” moments."

Cling Lamp is a smart light bulb that longs for intimacy. It explores the hidden emotional labor in smart products, reframing the attentional economy in today’s digital culture.

Instruction: whisper into the console box

"Cling Lamp is not just a light—it is your loyal companion. Don’t be alarmed if you see occasional flickers. It is only a small sign of longing for your intimate whisper. Safe to ignore, but never truly gone."

ClearDose is a device that gives “prescriptions” based on physiognomical readings. It explores the extractive and recursive relationship between AI models and humans.

Instruction: press a button while showing your face

"ClearDose gives you a prescription just perfect for you. Just press the button and look at the camera. The AI will know everything about you—and the uncertainties within you and every person who has stood before it."

Magic Infinity Ball does not want you asking too many questions, or shaking too many times. It explores how bodily interactions may accumulate over time and disrupt AI behaviors.

Instruction: hold, shake, and wait.

"Ask the Magic Infinity Ball anything! Shake the ball, and the answer will be revealed. Use or abuse at your own discretion. Be warned that asking too many questions, or shaking it too many times, may disrupt your fortunes."

Source Knowledge Nodes are a part of a series of accessories that store, share and care for the bytes we cherish most. Each belt hosts a micro-library of its wearer's favorite essays, books and photographs. When you shake hips with someone wearing another node, your collections get exchanged, creating an opportunity to be intentional about the materials you choose to keep in a limited customizable digital space.

The Nodes make sharing digital content a physical act through a private network, illustrating that human-authored sources aren’t going out of fashion any time soon and that you have ownership it’s router .

Coyote Computer is cobbled together from spare parts, found objects, a hand-coded browser interface, and a custom Pawpad™ controller. Interaction with the pad buttons of the paw controller displays coyote photographs on the soft-eared screen and emits field recordings of coyote vocalizations and ambient sound compositions through the snout speaker. The photographs and field recordings, taken between 2021 and 2026, are from the artist’s ongoing study of San Francisco’s coyote population.

This series explores the entangled relationships between nature and technology, while living in a surveilled state. Through experiments with living systems, machines, and the human body, the work asks how nature might resist, adapt to, or inhabit these systems.

What happens when technology becomes the object of desire, can a computer be a lover, or only a fantasy we’ve been sold?

This compilation of Computah’s Computer series imagines the world as one vast, voice-operated machine. Everything is a computer. Speaking in a fake, Sopranos-inspired accent, Julius programs the world around him.

Two Game Boys are connected by a link cable. On the first, visitors create a signature by entering a sequence of directional and button inputs. That sequence is transferred to a second, spiked Game Boy with no controls of its own, which serves as a reliquary for a shared save file of the exhibition.

Inside, an autonomous player moves through a wireframe world using the recorded inputs of previous visitors. Each new signature also places a small pylon within the landscape, leaving a permanent marker of the exchange.

Over time, the world is navigated and altered by people who are no longer present. The visitor can influence the system, but never directly control it. Each interaction becomes part of a shared record that continues after they leave.

The piece is a small model of how shared systems accumulate traces of the people who pass through them, allowing each contribution to become part of the system’s ongoing state.

Throughout history, the objects we carry have told the story of who we are — keychains, trinkets, charms, talismans. Small windows into private worlds. Our devices, by contrast, are identical. Dense digital museums that look like uniform black boxes.

For its public debut, Era collaborated with 30 artists, designers, and makers — giving each a puck: a minimal, modular AI device with a button, microphone, and speaker. Their only brief: build something that tells the story of the world as you see it, or the future you want to live in.

Each artist designed a custom enclosure — leather, glass, tree bark, woven textile — making every puck a one-of-a-kind object. Then, using Era’s intelligence layer, they shaped how their puck listens, reasons, and speaks: some with playful accents, others as artist aids, some in prose, others drawing on esoteric knowledge bases.

The result is a cornucopia of form and intelligence — 30 unique devices that think, speak, and behave differently. What happens when you give brilliant people the tools to build their own futures? These are the worlds they have bloomed.