Creative Work

I designed a game and installation based around the idea of “bullsh*t jobs” for a final class project. The initial inspiration came from wanting to design a game that is inherently annoying to play. This evolved into ideation around the nature of work and play in general, and the discourse over laptop jobs/white collar work in the modern era.

For the installation, I built out a small messy office workers desk (think Dennis Nedry in Jurrasic Park) and had a volunteer play as my employee while I sarcastically guided them through a day of "work" via the game. The player interacts with the game via keyboard, mouse, and gamepad controller, depending on the stage.

I designed and programmed the game in p5.js, with music and sound effects by Tate Gregor and myself.

As a brief followup, I created a simplified new version of the game that incorporated AI powered facial recognition, where the player is constantly being "monitored" by an AI overseer who gives them a score at the end based on its perception of their mood and emotional state while "working." I setup a system where screenshots of the player monitoring video are sent at a timed interval during play to OpenAI for analysis.

This project is an extraordinarily niche experience that shows you a photo of a character that appeared on the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld, and the player has to enter their name. Identifying obscure background characters from a TV show that has been off the air for nearly 30 years is an important life skill.

I first built out a web scraping tool using Python and BeautifulSoup to scrape screenshots of the show, along with script excerpts to identify the characters. Then I used the face_recognition Python library to extract a jpg of the faces from the screen grabs, paired them with a character name as the file name, and export.

The game is built in p5js (with some standard JavaScript), has a scoring system, and is very expandable. I did not scrape every character for the purposes of this project, but there is nothing restricting that.

Somethingelse is a concept I developed pushing back against the control that third party platforms have over artists promotion and development. Inspired by the diversity and creativity of musicians' websites of the late 1990s and 2000s as well as rave poster culture, I created a quasi platform that allows musicians to present and promote their work in a very visual way. Artists can upload an image promoting work or a live performance, a song, and a short description. Fans can browse and view these artist created pages, saving them for viewing later, or interact with them directly via comments. Part MySpace, part interactive posters, I created something that encourages experimentation and a return to the more fun side of the internet. What if we could stop just looking at lists of content and attempt to end the doomscroll? Somethingelse is a step in that direction.

This project was built in p5.js and presented at the NYU IDM Fall 2025 Thesis showcase. Most of the content on somethingelse (artist posters, music) is not original, and is intended only for academic and research purposes only.