Ara's Home Page

Hi. I'm Ara Knaian. Here is a snapshot of what I was doing in 1998, the last time this page was updated.

Yaw, Pitch, and Roll

Here's some high-drama hardware hacking. Check out the Project ORCA home page.

Randomness

We MIT students do some pretty crazy things to amuse ourselves. You'd be amazed what fun you can have with a vacuum cleaner, a hundred gallons of hot water, twenty bottles of joy, a kiddie pool, and a hundred or so overstressed people. Take a look at The Foam Party, photojournalism by Chris Snow. If you want to have your own foam party, here's how.

Musical Stuff

Lately, I've been doing tech stuff for the Musical Theater Guild and the Gilbert and Sullivan Players.

I I used to work with the Physics and Media Group and the Music Group, working on the Brain Opera. The Brain Opera is a traveling show that has an interactive musical installation and a performance, featuring Tod Machover's music and Sharon Daniel's visuals. Here are some pictures from behind the scenes at the Brain Opera.

The Brain Opera opened in New York at the Lincoln Center Festival for the Performing Arts, and has just finished its first world tour! We took it to the Ars Electronia Festival in Vienna, Austria, to Copenhagen, Denmark, and to the NexOpera Festival in Tokyo, Japan.

Hardware Hacking

Hardware hacking is a lot of fun. You get a whole bunch of broken junk, throw in a liberal helping of mail-ordered parts, and build somthing that works. My current hardware hacking project, which has been nearing completion for about a year now, is AOPS, which, despite the rumors that some people try to promulgate, does in fact stand for "Alpha Omicon Phone Switch."

Classes

  • 6.455 - Sonar, Radar, and Seismic Signal Processing
  • 18.075 - Advanced Calculus for Engineers
  • 6.341 - Discrete Time Signal Processing
  • 21W.738 - Words

    Other Stuff

  • Digital Simulator (1995)

  • Design of Programmable Matter: How to build sand-grain sized computers and robots (2008)

    Ara Knaian <ara@mit.edu>