Independent Study with Makey Makey
Posted: May 6, 2026 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Building on my skills and experiences from the DEMS class I took last semester, I wanted to use some independent study time to continue experimenting with Makey Makey to keep developing ideas for my MFA thesis project in dance. At the end of last semester, with the tools I had been experimenting with in DEMS such as Makey Makey, OSC, Live Video, NDI camera, Isadora, I combined my interests in movement and technology in my 2nd year showing performance and presented my work to my dance colleagues and professors. In that showing, I had used Makey Makey as a bridge between touch and memory/answer/response. After receiving feedback and progressing my ideas, I steered toward another trajectory in my approach where I started experimenting with absurdity and humor to reach the depth. This was also a progression I was able to mentally achieve this semester after the experience I devised with honey in DEMS last semester. Letting myself include objects in my artistic works with curated associations allowed me to keep asking and answering the question “What is the experience?” with each trial.
This semester, I also took a composition course called Rebel Innovations with Abby Zbikowski, where I had the chance to work on a new solo piece. In that piece titled “Am I too much pink?” I used several objects. Some of them are pink sunglasses that make you see the world in pink when you put them on, another pair of sunglasses with pink flowers all around the frame, tiny sunglasses that is too small for a human head, an ornament shaped like a unicorn, and a pink spatula shaped like a guitar.
Using objects, humor, and silliness, the piece implicitly explores themes of queerness, childlike disinhibition, neurodivergence, and ways of seeing/perceiving, through my and the audience’s interaction with the objects.
For my Independent Study, I decided to pursue my intended scores within this new context. My work for that class didn’t have the deep media systems component engrained other than using my phone to play music/sound and someone else’s phone to use the flashlight as a “spotlight”. But I remained interested in incorporating media systems because I am still interested in composing my final MFA thesis project with technology incorporation. So I worked with Isadora and Makey Makey to discover what the possibilities were. My main question was “How can Makey Makey and Isadora help me with building a bridge between object and meaning through a technology interface?” I remained interested in pursuing touch as a trigger for a response. My objects were mostly plastic and weren’t gonna conduct electricity the way I would need them to. So once again, I used the help of the conductive pencil to complete the Makey Makey connection. I programmed an Isadora patch with 9 scenes.
Using the keyboard watcher, text draw, trigger delay, jump, wave generator that’s set to random, colorizer, spinner, dots, and enter scene trigger, I designed/devised an experience where seeing the image of an object would prompt the interactor to touch the object, the object being touched would trigger a text or video to show up and those objects, texts and videos would accumulate in more questions for the interactors for them to reflect on internally.
Even though my initial Independent Study score also included exploring the relationship between camera, movement, and OSC, in this new context, I built a new relationship between movement and technology through pre-recorded videos and specific timestamps in the videos where that specific action would occur, asking the interactor to trigger the next scene through touch via Makey Makey when they encounter a specific movement.
As I have one more year left to develop my final piece, I am still in the building, questioning, asking, and responding phase. My explorations are finding micro shifts and deepening through experiments. With this Independent Study, I managed to accomplish my own scores and create a more solid foundation for my future creations involving objects, movement, Isadora, and Makey Makey.