Hello everyone! Welcome to my portfolio site that I created to initially document all the projects that I worked on as part of my Communications Lab class in Spring 2020. Now, the site is in the process of remodelling to include my Capstone project and some other works that I've done.
Ivory Lee is a fourth-year student at NYU Abu Dhabi currently completing her B.A. degree in both Interactive Media and in Political Science. As a third-culture kid, she made discoveries about the world through many cultural perspectives, yet, she didn’t know how she fit into the world as a mere passive thinker. Her interest in interactive media began in university when she realised how the practice of interactive storytelling is able to actively involve her in understanding the world. Her projects aim to bring out emotions through technology and focus on the various art forms that storytelling can take on.
Using a projected interactive installation, she gave users the chance to navigate through the wonders of our solar system on a journey to discover what is “out there”. Through film, she created an interactive video telling the bittersweet story of two roommates who are about to separate after graduation. As part of a sound project, she documented the many happy moments still present in the trying times of COVID-19. As a web-based story, she portrayed the difficult school lives of many refugee children when they are forced to leave home. Incorporating AR, she created pieces that dug into the emotional connections of Berlin’s architecture and history, told the lost stories of Oceania, and developed pieces that attempted to criticise the materialistic and capitalist world in which we currently live. Physically and using computer-aided design, she created two mechanisms that represented herself as part of a larger animated clock project. For her Capstone, she plans to document her grandma’s recipes as part of her journey to re-discover her culture and identity. With a mobile app accompanied with a physical recipe book, she hopes to share her grandmother’s cooking, history, and stories with the world, especially those who are away from and missing home.
Four year old me became infatuated with planets. It was their colours that first captured my attention. I knew nothing except for their names which I memorised through a tune in English class and their appearances which were printed into my book. By secondary school, I had learned more about our solar system mostly by watching video explanations in class and by taking class trips to the planetarium. In high school, I dove into the field of astrophysics learning about what is beyond our solar system and about the various knowns and unknowns about space. It involved a lot of books, videos, website browsing, and punching numbers into the calculator.
Then university came and took me on a trajectory that didn’t have anything to do with astrophysics at all. I made peace with the fact that my fascination with space would only be a hobby and not something that I would do academically, but I told myself that if a suitable time comes, “outer space” would be my topic. Almost as if I had prayed for a miracle, that fateful day came. A final project was in sight and I knew I wanted to tell stories and educate in a manner that I hadn’t seen space learning do before: a projected interactive installation.
Since that day, my inner rocket ship blasted off. I realised how much I would have loved to learn about planets through a process of almost getting to experience space travel. My interest in delving into the role that technology can bring education to children in non-traditional means and settings where there is more capacity for creativity and out-of-the-box thinking grew. The combination of design and both hardware and software development really allowed me to build from scratch and from the bottom up and gave me so much freedom for independent thinking than many of my other classes. Studying interactive media alongside the social sciences really allowed me to see the role that technology can play in helping convey political, social, economic, and historical stories in a non-conventional manner that allows information to be more easily understood, absorbed, or inspire more curiosity and evoke more emotions. It was as if I had discovered a whole new realm that was hidden from me.
And so my infatuation with the art of storytelling through new forms of technology began. I’ve played around with sensors, projections, audio, VR, AR, film, and the web and built machines, automatons, and physical installations all as part of my journey to discovering the various ways in which narratives could be told. Technology, although seemingly rigid in structure in its physicality, does have the capacity to aid in triggering emotions, whether good or bad. They inspire new thoughts and meaning and create new paths of understanding concepts and phenomena. Although my inner rocket ship is still travelling on a path to somewhere unknown, this is a goal that I want all my projects to achieve.
My Capstone is a cookbook accompanied with a mobile app that attempts to teach users how to cook certain dishes through an AR experience. The recipe book would be made into the cookbook style that is familiar with everyone, and the app will also include other elements that make the experience more wholesome. This project it dedicated to my grandma, who is an amazing cook, and to students abroad who are missing the taste of home.
View Project Process
The objective of this assignment was to create a website to house and debut the short video that we made in our first Communications Lab class. I decided to house the video by creating a page for a whole (fake) 30-min film festival happening in NYUAD, thereby extending the scope of the video itself.
View Project Jude and I decided to work on creating a comic that is aimed at showcasing refugee education. Refugee integration into education is a big issue because schools and education systems may not be well-equipped to provide refugees with the learning environment that they need to succeed in the most.
We made a comic that showcases what many refugee children experience in schools because of the lack of inclusion and understanding from their peers and/or teachers and other staff.
The goal of Susanne and my's sound project was to create something positive in current hard and trying times during the current Covid-19 pandemic. We wanted to spread some happiness with everyone through some sound recordings and/or soundscapes that we gathered from students all over the world.
View Project My video project is an attempt at a tribute for the class of 2020. It is also an attempt at highlighting a big pet peeve of mine, people being on their phones all the time. I think that in our modern-day society, we tend to care more about our online presence rather than focusing on what’s in front of us and because of this, we miss out on so much.
With the story, I hope to showcase the love and friendship that individuals have built with others throughout their university career.
