CHE-YU WU / LAB

A year in the making

Art, sound, tools and teaching meet on one wall. Follow a documented connection, or begin with a single piece of paper.

2018-09-09 — 2019-09-09
38 public records

Red string: documented links · Twine: shared themes · Hover a paper to read a connection.

Complete records ↓

Read the year downwards, one month at a time. The small tags under a card are its connections: open one to jump to the record it names.

2018 · 09

2018 · 10

2018 · 11

2018 · 12

2019 · 01

2019 · 02

2019 · 03

2019 · 04

2019 · 05

2019 · 08

Family treeHow 818 daily sketches grew out of one another46 families drawn as branching trees with thumbnails, 2018 to 2026

Complete records

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Each record retains its date basis, public sources and connection labels.

The CV gives only the month; the exact start date is still to be confirmed.Published

The NYU IDM research assistantship begins

The site's CV records the NYU IDM research assistantship as running from September 2018 to May 2020, and the M.S. in Integrated Digital Media as 2018 to 2020. Through this year he was student and teaching assistant at once, which is why the classroom demonstrations for Creative Coding sit in his public sketch archive with TA in front of their titles.

  • Teaching assistant
  • NYU IDM
Sources & related records
The site records the writing period as August 2018; the date used here is the Medium publication date of 20 September 2018, which falls just inside this window.Published

Brewing an online coding course that fuses web, design, maths and effects

A look back at the full year spent building his second Hahow course, on animated interactive web effects. The site's article page records 3,085 minutes of lessons, 60-plus worked examples and 400-plus slides, and notes that it became the longest course on Hahow at the time. The Medium original carries 4.2k claps.

  • Online courses
  • Course production
Sources & related records
Published

FUI – DataPoints

The site's experiments page lists this as FUI DataPoints, dated 29 September 2018; on OpenProcessing it is titled FUI - DataPoints. The research note says the exercise took three hours: values turn red past a threshold, a danger circle appears above eighty, translucent lines carry the structure, and flickering, jumping numbers report the state of the system.

  • Interfaces
  • p5.js
FUI DataPoints — sketch still
Che-Yu Wu / OpenProcessing
Sources & related records
Published

Fantasy user interface — an NYU IDM research note

The research page dates this note 2 October 2018. It starts from the interfaces in the Japanese animation Psycho-Pass, surveys how Ash Thorp, Jayse Hansen and Bradley G Munkowitz build screen graphics for science fiction films, and notes that such designers read pilots' manuals to decide what a panel should measure and analyse. It closes on his own three-hour p5.js FUI exercise.

  • Interfaces
  • Research notes
Sources & related records
The date is the one printed on the site's experiments page; the CodePen page gives no verifiable creation date.Published

Generative Music Matrix

The site's experiments page lists this as Generative Music Matrix, dated 9 October 2018, with the work preserved on CodePen. The research note describes giving every particle its own trigger period and adding ADSR envelopes to noise and sine waves to make the drums.

  • Generative music
  • CodePen
Sources & related records
Published

Generative audio research and experiments — an NYU IDM research note

The research page dates this note 9 October 2018. He begins with visits to the generative audio artist Chi Po-Hao before leaving Taiwan, then reads teropa's interactive essay and takes apart three examples: the virtual wheels behind Music for Airports, the 53 fragments and one rule of Terry Riley's In C, and Listen to Wikipedia, which sonifies edits to the encyclopedia. The note ends by embedding two experiments of his own, a music string and a music matrix.

  • Generative music
  • Research notes
Sources & related records
Taken from the GitHub repository creation date.Published

SocketMaxBridge — letting Max/MSP hear socket.io

A small public Node.js utility on GitHub. The repository describes connecting the UDP port that Max/MSP listens on to a particular socket.io server, with the target server set in config.json and an install path of three steps: Node and npm, clone, npm start. Separate files handle byte conversion and OSC. No licence is listed on the repository page.

  • Open source
  • OSC
Sources & related records
The site's experiments page says 21 October 2018 while OpenProcessing records creation late on 22 October; the two differ by a day.Published

Generative Music String

The site's experiments page lists this as Generative Music String, dated 21 October 2018. The research note describes it as a music string sounded by colliding particles, the first experiment he made after reading up on generative music, and it is one of the embeds the research page can load and run in place.

  • Generative music
  • Particles
Generative Music String — sketch still
Che-Yu Wu / OpenProcessing
Sources & related records
The site's experiments page says 28 October 2018 while OpenProcessing records creation in the small hours of 29 October; the two differ by a day.Published

Color drawing machine

The site's experiments page lists this as a drawing machine, dated 28 October 2018; on OpenProcessing it is titled color drawing machine. The sketch carries no written description and runs in the browser.

  • Drawing
  • p5.js
Color drawing machine — sketch still
Che-Yu Wu / OpenProcessing
Sources & related records
The work page is dated 8 November 2018 and the documentation video was uploaded the same day, while the page elsewhere gives the run as 15 October to 12 November. The festival programme link printed on the work page no longer resolves.Past event record

ARAMONO interactive sound exhibition — daily objects as instruments

A sound installation exhibition made with Earthing Way in Tau-Tiu-Tiann, dated 8 November 2018 on the work page, produced by Earthing Way and Zone Sound, running from 15 October to 12 November with sessions of about 120 minutes. The core move is turning daily objects into instruments by way of signal: visitors scan a QR code, open a web page and control the hardware from their phones, getting both audible feedback and visible kinetic movement. His roles were UI design, socket system design and technical support.

  • Sound installation
  • Everyday objects
ARAMONO interactive sound exhibition — work page image
Che-Yu Wu
Sources & related records
The title on the site's experiments page differs from the one on OpenProcessing; the two dates agree.Published

The north wind and the sun — water colour study

The site's experiments page lists this as The north wind and the sun, dated 7 December 2018; on OpenProcessing it is titled [TA] water color, and the TA prefix marks it as a teaching assistant's classroom demonstration as well. The sketch carries no written description.

  • Water colour
  • Teaching demo
The north wind and the sun — sketch still
Che-Yu Wu / OpenProcessing
Sources & related records
Taken from the GitHub repository creation date. The readme is a single title line, so what the work actually was is still to be confirmed.Published

Accapella_Jacket — a wearable experiment in one Python file

A public GitHub repository created on 13 December 2018 holding one index.py and a readme carrying nothing but the repository name, with Python as the listed language. No licence is given, and the page carries no description from which the finished piece could be described.

  • Wearables
  • Open source
Sources & related records
Published

Evolution diary of being a TA in grad school at NYU

An account of his first semester as a teaching assistant inside NYU IDM. The site's article page records that he applied for a UX designer post in the IT department and was ghosted, then applied for a research assistantship in his own department instead, and over one semester supported more than 40 students while building his own booking system, TA log, weekly reports, canned-email templates and performance analysis. The Medium original carries 2.5k claps.

  • Teaching assistant
  • Teaching systems
Sources & related records
Published

The evolution of information theory in the digital era — Media Theory D final essay

A final essay for Media Theory D at NYU IDM, dated 22 December 2018 on the site's research page. It runs from carvings on stone walls to Wiener's Cybernetics and Shannon's information theory, asking whether information stays the same thing across different receivers and mediums, and how the internet changed the way people process and interpret signals. The site carries the full PDF and ten diagrams drawn for it.

  • Information theory
  • Media theory
The evolution of information theory in the digital era — one of the essay's diagrams
Che-Yu Wu
Sources & related records
Taken from the GitHub repository creation date.Published

PlantSay — a node-based knowledge management prototype

A public Nuxt.js project on GitHub described in the repository as node-based knowledge management. It holds components, layouts, middleware, pages and deploy scripts, with Vue as the dominant language. No licence is listed on the repository page.

  • Knowledge management
  • Open source
Sources & related records
Taken from the GitHub repository creation date. There is no readme, so the purpose is read off the file names and the actual use is still to be confirmed.Published

Socket-OSC-Server — a signal relay server for workshops

A public Node.js repository on GitHub with no readme. Its files are socketio.js and workshopIndex.js, whose names show it handling both socket connections and an entry page for a workshop. No licence is listed on the repository page.

  • Open source
  • Workshops
Sources & related records
The site's CV gives only the year 2019 and Live Code NYC. The exact date and venue come from the Monthly Music Hackathon NYC recap page.Past event record

The modern web-based interaction of generative music systems — Live Code Lab

Live Code Lab, run by the Monthly Music Hackathon NYC and hosted by Integrated Digital Media at NYU Tandon. The organisers' recap records his live demonstration of bringing audience participation into a live-coded performance with the Web Audio API, Firebase and physics simulation: the room played along through the API, and one volunteer had his phone play the online instrument through its own motion. Kate Sicchio, Char Stiles and Jessica Garson spoke at the same event.

  • Talk
  • Live coding
Sources & related records
Published

Narrative VR week 1 — my first VR experience

The first weekly post for the Narrative VR class. He records starting the course that semester and his long-standing wish to make VR tied to music, art and generative work. The rest walks piece by piece through Henry, VR Showdown, Dear Angelica, Google Earth VR and Tilt Brush, comparing which ones carry a story and which leave only technical shock.

  • VR
  • Course journal
Sources & related records
Taken from the date printed on the work page. The page has no description, so the details are still to be confirmed.Published

Google internship design practice

The work page is dated 10 February 2019 and categorised as UI/UX and visual. It carries a single image and no written description. The title marks it as a design exercise made for a Google internship application.

  • Interface design
  • Exercise
Google internship design practice — work page image
Che-Yu Wu
Sources & related records
Published

Video Art week 2 — green screen compositing

A weekly post on the green-screen exercise for the Video Art class. The group shot a short piece in which a giant picks up a tiny man, plays with him and finally eats him. He records leaning heavily on time remapping to sync the two performances, splitting the giant onto two layers so a finger can pass in front of the small man, and notes that the green screen was too small for the actor's full movement and the set too dark, leaving noise in the key.

  • Video
  • Course journal
Sources & related records
Published

Narrative VR week 2 — my first Unreal VR scene

He builds his first VR scene with Unreal's scene builder, a small island sitting in the middle of the sea. Someone on it has spelled HELP out of wood beside a campfire, waiting to be found. The post records a day version and a night version, his fondness for the reflections around the island at night, and a gold mine on the mountain that buys nothing.

  • Unreal
  • VR
Sources & related records
Published

Video Art week 3 — distortion and slow motion

The week's assignment is distortion and slow motion. The first half of the post is his own framing: time is relative and so is space, three-dimensional creatures cannot sense the distortion of the universe because they are part of it, and this video looks from a four-dimensional vantage point. The second half is technique: a gradient distorts time, fractal noise distorts the background text, and the sound is time-remapped so the stretch is audible too.

  • Video
  • Time
Sources & related records
Published

Universe

The site's experiments page lists this as Universe, dated 27 February 2019, and it carries the same title on OpenProcessing. The sketch has no written description and runs in the browser.

  • Cosmos
  • p5.js
Universe — sketch still
Che-Yu Wu / OpenProcessing
Sources & related records
The CV gives only the month; opening and closing dates could not be confirmed from the source.Past event record

Listening Machine Exhibition — Taipei Artist Village

The site's CV files this exhibition under March 2019 at the Taipei Artist Village and links to the documentation video for Song of Distances. During the year he spent in New York, the work travelled back to Taipei on its own.

  • Exhibition
  • Taipei
Sources & related records
The date is the one printed on the site's experiments page; the CodePen page gives no verifiable creation date.Published

Pendulum Generative Audio

The site's experiments page lists this as Pendulum Generative Audio, dated 7 March 2019, with the work preserved on CodePen. The site's work page files it under generative and says only that it is an original experiment kept on CodePen.

  • Generative music
  • Pendulums
Pendulum Generative Audio — work page image
Che-Yu Wu
Sources & related records
Taken from the GitHub repository creation date. The repository is empty, so only the name and the date can be recorded; the content is still to be confirmed.Published

GPSRadio2019 — a GPS radio repository left as a name

A public GitHub repository created on 8 March 2019 containing only a readme with the repository name, no code at all, and empty language statistics. No licence is listed on the page.

  • GPS
  • Open source
Sources & related records
Taken from the GitHub repository creation date. There is no readme, so the commission and whether it shipped are still to be confirmed.Published

VolvoCar2019 — a client project split into site and game

A public GitHub repository with no readme. It splits into site_dev and game_dev directories plus cache, commit and deploy scripts, with JavaScript and Vue as the main languages. No licence is listed on the repository page.

  • Open source
  • Web projects
Sources & related records
Published

Narrative VR midterm — twenty-four hours laid out in a line

The midterm is a time visualisation of an ordinary day. The character wakes in his own room, passes through different places and hours and ends at a late-night party, while the player walks along the timeline and the world keeps moving and rotating as the exploring continues. The post is honest about how hard building a 3D scene from nothing is: subdivision is lost on import into Unreal, the sofa and pillow look too hard to sleep on, and the rotation centre of the clock hands is unsolved.

  • Narrative
  • Unreal
Sources & related records
The post is titled Week 6, which does not run on the same numbering as the Video Art week 3 post. The publication date is used here instead.Published

Video Art week 6 — projection mapping

He and his teammate Calvin buy lamp covers from Target as projection targets. The post records that the shapes are playful, that they built motion graphics from shapes, lines and text to throw onto them, and that they also tried cartoon footage and audio waveform visualisation. He notes how well real objects read as traffic signs once skinned, that the reflection in the lamp cover's plastic wrapping looks like Lumia, and that the Vega effect works on vector shapes but not on cartoons.

  • Projection mapping
  • Course journal
Sources & related records
Whether the work page's 15 March 2019 marks the public premiere could not be confirmed. The documentation video was uploaded on 22 May 2019 under Chi Po-Hao's name, while the work page records it as a co-creation.Past event record

Song of Distances — turning distance into music with GPS

The work page is dated 15 March 2019 and credits him as developer, co-created with Chi Po-Hao. It is a participatory web-based music composition that turns positioning data into audible events: each session that grants GPS access becomes a node on a topographic coordinate, the system keeps computing session length and each node's distance from the centre to trigger the music, and device orientation sets the direction of sound in the spatial audio field. Location data streams over socket.io and OSC and syncs on Firebase, so moving is playing.

  • Sonification
  • Participatory
Song of Distances — work page image
Che-Yu Wu
Sources & related records
The work page carries no date. The month comes from the 2019/04 path of the images embedded in it, and the page records a further revision in early May that recognises the dice individually.Published

The Gambling Lamp — brightness decided by dice and computer vision

A piece for the Net Devices class at NYU IDM. The work page records his fascination with gambling: the result is decided by luck and nobody controls it. So he built a lamp whose brightness can only be changed by rolling dice, with a camera reading the pips and summing them. After demonstrating at the expo 74 science fair he moved to contour detection, masking each die separately to count its dots and excluding zero-dot and oversized white areas to steady the control. The hardware is a lamp from Target rebuilt with a 110V to 5V supply and a NeoPixel strip, driven by a Wi-Fi ESP8266.

  • Physical computing
  • Computer vision
The Gambling Lamp — work page image
Che-Yu Wu
Sources & related records
The site's experiments page says 1 April 2019 while OpenProcessing records creation on 16 April; the two are half a month apart.Published

Fern

The site's experiments page lists this as Fern, dated 1 April 2019, and it carries the same title on OpenProcessing. A companion sketch, Fern With Sound, sits beside it. The sketch has no written description.

  • Plants
  • Recursion
Fern — sketch still
Che-Yu Wu / OpenProcessing
Sources & related records
Taken from the GitHub repository creation date.Published

CreativeCoding_IDM_2019 — the teaching repository for the assistantship

A public Vue project on GitHub whose name marks it as belonging to Creative Coding at NYU IDM in 2019. The readme carries only the standard project commands, and the tree holds src, public and tests. No licence is listed on the repository page.

  • Teaching material
  • Open source
Sources & related records
Published

Video Art week 7 — driving video from generative music in Max

He builds a minor-key generative passage in Max/MSP, lets the notes combine at random, and on every chord or note change switches the video source and resets the transform of the jit.matrix, so the output arrives glitched and doubled. Knobs on his MIDI keyboard drive the metro object to change tempo, and he writes that the sun in the back stands for time ticking while the changing footage stands for everything moving, fading into the past faster the faster time is pushed.

  • Max
  • Generative music
Sources & related records
Taken from the date printed on the work page; whether it marks completion or first showing could not be confirmed. The honours line adds NYC Media Lab Exhibition 2019 and a Deloitte private showcase in 2020, both after this window.Published

Floating in the Sky — lifting an umbrella and flying

The work page is dated 1 May 2019, lists him as designer and developer, and names the VR Studio at IDM NYU as the context. It is a first-person interactive story: a lonely character lifts an umbrella and flies into the sky, finds the world still beautiful and full of hope, and finally passes the umbrella to another lonely person, until many coloured umbrellas float in the night sky. The page sets out the technique in detail: Unreal's Sequencer drives the narrative, a pressure sensor on an ESP8266 sends its signal over OSC into the umbrella object, the camera closes on the umbrella's position a little on every tick, and a sound ball in the sky makes the score louder the higher you rise.

  • VR
  • Narrative
Floating in the Sky VR experience — work page image
Che-Yu Wu
Sources & related records
Taken from the GitHub repository creation date.Published

IDM_Creative_Coding — the site for his own seminar

A public Vue project on GitHub, much larger than the similarly named repository from a month earlier: its stylesheets alone run to seven hundred thousand bytes, and it ships cache, commit and deploy scripts plus an .env.example. The readme carries only the standard project commands, and no licence is listed.

  • Teaching material
  • Open source
Sources & related records
The title on the site's experiments page differs from the one on OpenProcessing; the two dates agree.Published

Test Earth Link

The site's experiments page lists this as a network attack, dated 8 May 2019; on OpenProcessing it is titled Test Earth Link. The sketch has no written description and runs in the browser.

  • Data visualisation
  • Globe
Test Earth Link — sketch still
Che-Yu Wu / OpenProcessing
Sources & related records
Taken from the YouTube upload date. The CV gives no year for this work and the video's title is only a capture timestamp.Published

VR L-system tree planting

The site's CV lists this video among his works and attributes it to New Reality Company. It was uploaded to his own YouTube channel on 13 August 2019 under a title that is only a capture timestamp. The same CV records his term as Unreal VR/AR engineer at New Reality Company and R/GA as May to August 2019.

  • VR
  • L-systems
Sources & related records