Date of Defense

4-21-2026

Date of Graduation

5-2026

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Wuwei Shen

Second Advisor

Jacklyn Brickman

Abstract

Our client, Jacklyn Brickman, an assistant professor of kinetic imaging at the Frostic School of Art, has been creating interactive art using the electrical signals read from plants. So far, she has been able to create music that changes in real-time as you physically interact with plants. Supporting this is the Playtronica Biotron, a device that emits MIDI (a digital data format used to represent music notes) generated from a plant’s electrical signals. For future art projects, she has been looking to generate live visualizations as a part of the plant and Biotron music setup. Doing this in existing general-purpose art-visualization software (e.g., TouchDesigner) is possible but challenging due to the learning curve of existing software options, which all require a high level of knowledge about how computers process digital audio and video. This need for a simpler piece of software was the starting point for our project, a biofeedback visualizer called Substrate. Substrate is a purpose-built desktop application designed to be as easy as possible to use for creating interactive real-time visualizations. It does this by providing a node-based interface for manipulating video-file inputs with MIDI-controlled image effects. Because of the scale of the application, our team opted to manage our codebase, planned work, and other related documents with tooling from Atlassian (Jira, Bitbucket, and Confluence). These industry-standard tools, along with the early design decision to split our Rust codebase into 3 non-overlapping sections (a user interface, a GPU effects engine, and a media processing library), allowed us to effectively collaborate on a project that has surpassed 35,000 lines of code. The result of our work is a functional desktop software that enables a non-technical user to easily experiment with MIDI-controlled video effects and visualization. Our client currently has plans to use Substrate as part of an art exhibit at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland this summer.

Comments

Co-authored with:

Zach Bishop

William Laham

Claire Wood

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Restricted

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