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MAGDA GOURINCHAS
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Real-Time
Live, interactive, & system-responsive work

Sudden Occlusion

ongoing

About

Sudden Occlusion is "a phantasmagoric horror-road movie" directed by Rebecca Shapass and "set in the simulation of an autonomous car’s AI-training system." The project, experienced as an immersive 360° VR video, reconstructs Pittsburgh from the open-source Aurora Multi-Sensor point-cloud Dataset. The work places the viewer inside a fragmented digital city, where, through embodied navigation, visibility is partial and spatial continuity is deliberately disrupted.

As the car (the viewer) attempts to recollect the post-industrial landscape of Pittsburgh, the sample training model it is able to access renders its limited memory full of fissures. Rather than arriving at any one place, a journey through this model’s simulation acquaints viewers with the machine’s method of perception and poses for them a question of identifying / disidentifying with the ways the AI forms knowledge and holds memories of the world. By emphasizing occlusion, compression, and absence, the work ultimately questions what is lost when cities are experienced as stitched datasets rather than lived environments.

Client

Rebecca Shapass

Tools

Software
Blender
Unity

Funding

Heinz Endowment Grant (2023)

How Many Birds Would it Take to Carry my Shadow?

2025

About

How Many Birds Would It Take to Carry My Shadow is an immersive installation transforming participants’ silhouettes. Using a depth Kinect camera, the work captures bodies in real-time. I convert their silhouettes into point clouds that either scatter or assemble in response to human gestures and live music improvisations.

Inspired by the photographic work of Xavi Bou, which captures the trajectory of birds in flight, I attempt to visualize shadows similarly, as temporal collective motion.

Client

Notch Magazine

Tools

Software
TouchDesigner
Kinect

Exhibition

Notch Paris Launch @ Frequence18 (Paris, FR) 2025 + Notch Soft Projections Showcase @ Perche (Paris, FR) 2025

Sinus Caves

2025

About

Built from my personal CT scan data, this project transforms medical imaging into an interactive experience navigated through hand gestures. The user, in this case, myself, scrolls through volumetric slices of tissue and bone, shifting perspectives through simple movements.

The work reframes clinical data as something tactile and personal. By reclaiming diagnostic imagery as interactive material, the project explores how design can better foster understanding around the body.

Tools

Software
TouchDesigner
Physical Material◦s
MRI scans

What's My Method?

2024

About

What’s My Method? is an interactive educational game developed with SolitonZ Games that reimagines contraceptive education as a playful, accessible experience. Designed for tablet use in healthcare settings——specifically deployed on tablets in partnership with the Barbados Family Planning Association——the game introduces users to different contraceptive methods through short scenarios, animations, and decision-based interactions.

As Creative Lead, I shaped the project through interaction design and visual language. My role focused on translating complex and sensitive health information into intuitive, non-stigmatizing gameplay—using humor, clear iconography, and narrative scenarios to support learning through exploration rather than instruction.

Client

Solitonz Games

Tools

Software
Adobe CC

A Little Too Flexible

2022

About

Comic culture, dominated by both male creators and audiences, and propped up by the uncredited labor of women illustrators and writers, becomes an echo chamber that amplifies sexist visual tropes. With its most notorious being the hyper-sexualized, and anatomically impossible poses female characters are routinely drawn in. And, as if trained contortionists, these characters twist their bodies in ways that almost always deliberately showcase their breasts, buttocks, and faces.

A Little too Flexible confronts the absurdity and flips the visual logic on its head. Using a Kinect depth camera to capture my own body in real time, I force myself into those absurd, bone-breaking “superheroine” postures. The software struggles to resolve my joints, resulting in a glitchy rig and intentionally messy animation. I ultimately want to highlight the anatomical silliness of these poses and moreover expecting any body, print, digital, or flesh, to conform.

Tools

Software
TouchDesigner
Kinect

Dollhouse

2022

About

Dollhouse is a “temper tantrum simulator” that exaggerates emotional expression through reactive gameplay. The game is set inside a digital replica of the dollhouse in my childhood bedroom, with the user scaled down to emphasize confinement and lack of control. Progression requires the user to interact with toy objects in the space, forcing engagement rather than offering choice.

The project draws from early experiences of emotional excess and explores how such behavior is socially critiqued along gendered lines. While anger or intensity in boys is often reframed as confidence, similar expressions in girls are too frequently dismissed as irrational or “bratty.” By placing the player in a constrained, infantilized environment, the game recreates feelings of powerlessness in response to emotinal duress.

Tools

Software
Unreal Engine
Blender

Exhibition

Gates Games Premiere @ Gates (Pittsburgh, PA) 2022

Motherly Tendencies

2022

About

Motherly Tendencies is an interactive game developed in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The project examines motherhood not only as a personal identity, but as a condition that may be socially and legally imposed. Drawing from online forums and social media discourse, the work investigates how mothers are critiqued, categorized, and constrained through language.

Set within a surreal domestic environment, the game presents four coexisting maternal archetypes—the mother bee, the workaholic, the drunk, and the absent mother—each occupying the same home. By forcing these contradictory identities to exist simultaneously, the project highlights the impossibility of meeting societal expectations placed on mothers, particularly in a climate where reproductive choice is increasingly restricted.

Tools

Software
Unity
Blender

Awards

Samuel Rosenberg Award (Spring 2023)

Shadow Extractor

2022

About

Shadow Extractor was part of a large-scale immersive event combining interactive visuals, live music, and spatial sound. The projection-based installation operated in which participants walk across a white floor beneath a concealed overhead camera. The camera captures the space from above and processes the visual input into a high-contrast threshold map of the floor and the participants’ silhouettes. This threshold map is then used to drive the projected visuals in real time.

The project explores shadows as both a trace of the body and how our outlines can become blurred when multiple individual shadows amalgamate.

Client

WQED

Tools

Software
TouchDesigner

Funding

This project has been supported by funding from Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry Frank-Ratchye Further Fund (2022).

Exhibition

Effervescent Shadow Bazaar @ WQED Studios (Pittsburgh, PA) 2022

I Miss Home

2019

About

I Miss Home documents an interaction with a compact, portable, tactile sculpture designed to evoke the idea of home while functioning as a stress-relief device. The work centers on the act of engaging with the object rather than the object as a standalone artifact.

I sewed a small three-dimensional house—four walls and a slanted roof—out of soft plastic and fit it with an Arduino, tubing, and miniature air valves. When powered, it slowly inhales and exhales, mimicking the rhythm of breath.

Created during a period of homesickness, the piece reframes attachment to place through a repetitive, embodied gesture: holding, watching, and breathing alongside the form. Meaning accumulates through the durational interaction, positioning the experience itself as the core of the work.

Tools

Software
arduino
Physical Material◦s
soft plastic film, tubing,

Awards

Regina Gouger Miller Scholarship