Graduate of Syracuse University’s 5 year Industrial and Interaction Design program (BID) and received her MFA in Media Design from ArtCenter College of Design.
Publications: (1) Manual Dexterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input, CHI 2010: I Need Your Input. (2) Pen + Touch = New Tools, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, CHI Alt.chi Paper. (3) Mixsourcing: Exploring Bounded Creativity as a Form of Crowdsourcing, Published by ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Work shown at art, architecture, and design events including — Netflix’s series The Future of ep. Gaming, LA’s Architecture and Design Museum, Venice Biennale of Architecture, Dutch Design Week, and Die Digitale, DDDD, Spring Break Art Show, FEMMEBIT, Navel, Roger’s Office Gallery, IxDA 2019, The Swiss Architecture Museum; Architektur Galerie Berlin; BODY and the Anthropocene; the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture; Architecture + Design Museum; Open City Art City Festival at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Post-Internet Cities Conference; The Graduate Center for Critical Studies; KAM Workshops: Artificial Natures; and CHI. Her projects have been featured in Wallpaper, The Guardian, Wired Magazine, Anti-Utopias, Test Plots Magazine.
Contact: house@jennyrodenhouse.com
Wreck a Nice Beach
2025, Voice User Interface, Unity, Video, Interview with Crazy Minnow Studio, 6:05
We read mouths. We interpret them. We design them. We have programmed them to behave in specific ways. Wreck a Nice Beach is a voice user interface that treats the mouth as a visual language, using lip-synchronization software to approximate speech as shape. The interface employs audio amplitude and phoneme detection to generate visemes, the visual counterparts of phonemes. By intentionally misaligning sound and shape, the work produces new facial expressions, meanings, and modes of communication, exposing the gap between what is said and what is shown.
Ventriloquy, making one's voice appear to come from somewhere else, is a useful description of what all lip-sync software does. The video is built from an interview with Crazy Minnow Studio, creators of SALSA Lip-Sync, an animation tool used to puppeteer character mouths in video games and 3D simulations. The tool's own creators are ventriloquized by their software, their voices translated into computational gestures that both mimic and distort human expression. Phonemes are deliberately reassigned to mismatched visemes: an 'm,' which should produce a closed, flat mouth, is mapped to an 'o,' triggering a jaw-expanding shape instead. Familiar words produce unfamiliar faces. The mouth becomes legible as a designed object, shaped by assumptions about how speech should look.
The title, Wreck a Nice Beach, comes from a well-known failure in early speech recognition. Systems that parsed phonemes consistently heard "recognize speech" as "wreck a nice beach." That mishearing captures something essential about how machines process voice: through approximation, pattern matching, and inference, not fidelity. The lip-sync system in this work operates through the same logic, translating sound into shape through computational models of expression. From the vocoder's error to the viseme's approximation of an 'e' like smile, machine-mediated speech has always been a site of translation, not transmission. As AI-driven systems increasingly speak on our behalf in games, virtual production, and social media, the cultural and aesthetic assumptions embedded in those translations become urgent questions. Communication technologies, particularly AI-driven interfaces, function as interpretive systems, not transparent channels. When software speaks for us, it doesn't just represent us. It redefines what expression, agency, and presence mean in digital environments.
Thank you to Crazy Minnow Studio
Dent
2024, 3D Interface, Typeface Generator
A playable type generator created in Unity. Throw balls at the letter form to create creases and folds, deforming the meaning.
Everything as Input
Teaching Team — Jenny Rodenhouse, Ben Hooker, & John Brumley TA — Alan Amaya Meta Reality Labs, University Collab Program — Michael Ishigaki, Roger Ibars, Aaron Faucher, Ata Dogan
Talking to Things 2024 - Ongoing, Dataset, Microscope, Video with Lambda Vue
How do computer vision systems perceive and reconstruct speech from material vibrations, and what does this reveal about the ways AI translates between physical motion, sound, and language? When machines perceive our voices through matter, what new forms of communication and miscommunication emerge?
Computer vision models can recover speech from the subtle vibrations of objects. Using Lambda Vue, a software that amplifies minute motions in video, and a microscope, Talking to Things captures microscopic voice markers from material vibrations. In this case study, tinfoyl (a phonetic writing of tinfoil) is spoken to a sheet of foil, generating a visual dataset that maps graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds).
Talking to Things examines AI-mediated perception and computational sensing, exploring how machines “see,” “hear,” and “understand” the world through data. Computer vision systems capable of recovering speech from visual motion signals a shift in how communication is conceived: language becomes a physical event, and matter itself becomes a communicative surface. It asks what kind of “listening” occurs when AI detects voice through the movement of materials, and how such systems extend or displace human sensory perception.
By observing how computer vision detects and amplifies microscopic vibrations, the project found that machines treat physical motion as a kind of language—translating the invisible resonance of voice into visual data. These transformations expose the interpretive and speculative nature of machine sensing: AI does not simply capture speech but infers and imagines it, piecing together traces of motion and pattern to produce a voice.
In this way, technology becomes both translator and storyteller, reframing communication as a negotiation between signal, noise, and imagination. Technologies of perception do not just extend human senses, they invent new ways of speaking altogether.
With Caro Trigo, Mavis Yue Cao, Christie Wu
Player Non Player
Teaching Team — Alice Bucknell & Jenny Rodenhouse
Parade Town
The project investigates the history of parades as promotions of unrecognized communities and declarations of desired power. Using augmented reality and computer vision, the projects celebrate the seen/unseen activity and expressions of downtown Los Angeles.Taught students to create augmented reality lenses using custom computer vision models. Students used machine learning and data training as a visual anthropology study of the city. The course culminated in a public exhibition in downtown Los Angeles. Visitors used QR codes to launch individual student projects and trigger digital overlays that called attention to objects, scenes, or urban conditions selected by the student.
Designed 3D motion graphics and coded curtains to promote student exhibition and course Parade Town: A procession of augmented realities in DTLA. Motion graphics produced in Unity, a game development engine, to simulate the behavior of augmented reality, hiding and revealing the title of the exhibition.
Designed curtains with QR codes as a checkered textile pattern. Codes hosted augmented reality exhibition, launching individual AR projects during gallery pandemic closure.
Work by — Alan Amaya, Jeremy Yijie Chen, Shiyi Chen, Dunstan Christopher, Elizabeth Costa, Noah Curtis, Cha Gao, Jingwei Gu, Sean Jiaxing Guo, Kate Ladenheim, Miaoqiong Huang, Blake Shae Kos, Jeung Soo Lee, Hongming Li, Tingyi Li, Fuyao Liu, Guowei Lyu, Yiran Mao, Elaine Purnama, Mario Santanilla, Qi Tan, Lucas Thin, Zeyu Wang, Zhiyan Wang, Zoey Wang, Christie Wu, Yue Xi, Haoran Xu, Qianyue Yuwen, Fanxuan Zhu
Exhibition and Teaching Team — John Brunley, Ben Hooker, Jenny Rodenhouse, & Christina Valentine
Course — IxP1: Intro to Prototyping
Immersion Lab
2016 - Ongoing, Lab & Pedagogy, Faculty Director, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA
Started the Immersion Lab 8 years ago at ArtCenter as a space that provides equal access to emerging technologies for art, design, and research.
Conduct design research on emerging technology through hands-on prototyping in support of cross-disciplinary course programming, IxD curriculum, and design education materials (lectures, workshops, tutorials).
Developed Technology-Centered Design Research methodology as a design research approach and communication strategy for students. It is a primary research method of understanding emerging technologies and mediums through investigative making to inform UX and 3D interaction design opportunities.
Curate hardware and software library for investigative study - AR/VR, computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D engines, motion capture, spatial computing, and scanning.
Collaborate across ArtCenter departments and with visiting Industry sponsors to create relevant courses that communicate to a diversity of students, learning types, and skill levels.
Sponsors/Partners — Patagonia, Meta Reality Labs, Unity, Leap Motion, Google Daydream, Gravity Sketch, HTC Vive, National Research Group, Oculus, Size Stream, and Snap Inc Research.
Immersion Lab Featured in Core77 — “ArtCenter's Jenny Rodenhouse on Integrating VR/AR Technologies into Design School Curriculum”.
Intro to Mixed Reality
Teaching Team — Jenny Rodenhouse & John Brumley
Terrestrial Tales: 100+ Takes on Earth
2019, Multi-channel Video Installation, 13:15, ETH Zurich, Marc Angélil, Department of ArchitectureIf we consider the historical globe as an early dataset—a material index of humanity's spatial, political, and cultural knowledge—how do contemporary planetary images from AI and satellites build upon or break from that legacy? In the transition from physical object to computational model, what is revealed about the relationship between technology, power, and how we imagine our place in the world?
Terrestrial Tales is a multi-channel video installation that explores how our understanding of the Earth has been shaped by evolving systems of data, visualization, and narrative. Drawing from a research archive of over one hundred historical globes by Marc Angélil and Carey Siress, the work examines the relationship between technology, representation, and humanity’s self-image.
The installation traces a visual genealogy of the planet, from hand-painted spheres to algorithmic renderings, revealing how each era encodes its worldview into the Earth’s image. Composed of 19 synchronized videos, the work weaves together historical documentation with contemporary media—juxtaposing sources as diverse as Bruno Latour’s lectures on Gaia and Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball—to explore how our perception of the planet oscillates between scientific model, ideological projection, and pop-cultural spectacle.
The project considers the globe as both an artifact and a dataset, a cumulative index through which humanity has sought to measure, contain, and visualize the world. Just as AI systems construct planetary-scale models through the accumulation of digital data, historical globes embody earlier attempts to totalize knowledge and assert control through representation. Together, these histories reveal that our maps of the earth are also maps of belief, each reflecting a distinct way of knowing, claiming, or imagining the planet. In an era of planetary computation, the project asks us to critically consider what kind of world is being constructed and by whom.
Introduction text — Marc Angélil Exhibition design — Ciro Miguel, Tobias Klauser in collaboration with Marc Angélil. Videos — Jenny Rodenhouse. Exhibition team — Marcin Ganczarski, Ellen Reinhard, David Roth, Cary Siress, Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz, and Leonard Streich.