Eremomycete

Welded Steel, Wood, Electronics, 48"x24"x42", 2024

Eremomycete is an anti-telephone bench project, whose name comes from Eremo- + -Mycete. It is inspired by the dying furniture of telephone tables or gossip benches and the pink oyster mushroom. Because the telephone started as such a large and heavy object, the telephone bench emerged as an iconic piece of furniture to provide a table to hold the phone as well as a seat for one to sit and use the phone. Drawing from the iconic curves of gossip benches while using fungus imagery for the side table, this piece, a fungi-phone bench of sorts, acts as an anti-telephone table. If the user sits down on the bench and does not also put their phone away on the side table, then it will activate a loud countdown. This countdown will stop if the user puts their phone down on the sensor or gets up off the seat. I welded together the frame, cut and attached the wood pieces, and created a custom velostat sensor with conductive thread together  with the circuit I designed. Exhibited at the Bi-Annual ASU Sculpture Show 2024.

MAAS System

I invented the Motion Augmented Acoustic Skate (MAAS) system, a device that transforms a skate’s sound and motion into a real-time auditory tool for figure skaters. Inspired by the skating tradition of “figures,” the Motion Augmented Acoustic Skate system enhances a skate’s existing acoustic feedback for non-jumping implementations. Using a contact microphone, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), a radio transmitter, and a Wi-Fi microcontroller, the system wirelessly transmits sound and motion to an off-ice computer for signal processing. The resulting sonification output, altered through physical modeling and motion mappings, transmits back to the skater in real-time. Project began development during a competitive 10-week REU program.

project Publications

Leah Donnelly. 2024. The Motion Augmented Acoustic Skate (MAAS) System: A Device for Real-Time Figure Skating Sonification. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 23, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3658852.3658877

OUt of Order

Electronics, Other, 2023

Out of Order exposes parts of living with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) that are often concealed due to stigma. The toilet plays audio-haptic gut noises recorded by the artist that can be randomly chosen by flushing the toilet handle. Selected quotes from IBS sufferers' stories surround the toilet in shades of stool. And on the toilet paper roll, key statistics become visible when pulled out. This is an interactive installation. The artist encourages viewers to “feel” the noises (placing hands on parts of the seat, sitting on the toilet itself, etc.), unravel the toilet paper to grasp the physical space of the statistics,  take a “dump” by leaving a message in the toilet bowl, and sit down on the loo and read through the IBS digest on the wall to learn what IBS is and why this project exists. Shown in the Data Feminism Exhibition 2023 ASU.