Katherine Moriwaki

Katherine Moriwaki is an Assistant Professor of Media Design in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York City. She teaches core classes in the M.F.A. Design + Technology Program where students engage a broad range of creative methodologies to realize new possibilities in interactive media.

Her work has appeared in numerous festivals and conferences including numer.02 at Centre Georges Pompidou, Futuresonic, Break 2.2, SIGGRAPH, eculture fair, Transmediale, ISEA, Ars Electronica, WIRED Nextfest, and Maker Faire. Her publications have appeared in a wide range of venues such as Rhizome.org, Ubicomp, CHI, ISEA, NIME, the European Transport Conference, and the Journal of AI & Society. Her project Umbrella.net, in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen was featured in “New Media Art” by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana in 2006.

Working within a broad range of areas, Katherine’s work spans disciplines and communities of practice. She has taught at a wide variety of institutions and departments, such as Trinity College Dublin, Rhode Island School of Design, and Parsons School of Design, as has lead workshops on interaction design and the creative re-use of electronic objects around the globe. These “Scrapyard Challenge” workshops have been held thirty-seven times in fourteen countries across five continents. Katherine received her Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where people and enabling interaction were emphasized over any specific technology. She was a 2004 recipient of the Araneum Prize from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO.

Workshop with Saman Rezazadeh Tehrani

Umbrella.net - A Multi-hop Dynamic Routing Ad-Hoc Network

This workshop will explore artistic applications of multi-hop dynamic routing ad-hoc networks. In 2004 Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen created the artwork Umbrella.net. The project utilized a functioning multi-hop dynamic ad-hoc network infrastructure, implemented by the NTRG - the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College Dublin. The network consisted of multiple moving network nodes whose physical and network configuration change in relation to each other constructing adaptive pathways of data in real-time. In 2016 Katherine Moriwaki and Saman Tehrani have begun to resurrect the project, utilizing contemporary technology and open source software and hardware. While twelve years have passed since the initial instance of this artwork there are still not many artworks that take advantage of a fully functioning multi-hop dynamic routing ad-hoc network as their underlying infrastructure. Katherine and Saman will discuss the current instance of the project and what features are currently being planned for the network. They will also compare past infrastructure and technology to what is currently available in the open source community and market. Participants will engage in an activity that will collectively imagine possible applications of these kinds of networks beyond the one being built for Umbrella.net.