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Residents’ Digest #02

Craig

Resident's Digest Cover: Week 4

Antonius

Last week I started my ITP/IAC fellowship with Mindspark. My team is great. I’m learning so much and they’re very open to me ideating, building and implementing a new product. At ITP, I’ve been running the Illustrator workshops with Genevieve and continuing the Smart Crafting workshop series with Merche, this time on computerized embroidery. Because of high interest, I believe I will run the embroidery workshop again. The fabrication tool I’m most uncomfortable with is the CNC router, so of course I got asked to consult on a project that specifically needs it. I’m friends with carpenter and frame-maker Barry Frier, who works with artist Vik Muniz. Together, we visited the NYU Advanced Media Studio (AMS) to talk about 3D scanning and replicating the frames of works of high art, specifically Rembrandt’s “Lucretia” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. But I had to put everything on hold to make sure I had time to write a decent post for my Art21 blog column, Praxis Makes Perfect. And also to rearrange my thesis presentation for ESI Design – Michael Luck Schneider invited me to talk about our responsibilities as designers when introducing new technologies to different cultures and generations. It got me fired up and energized to revisit my thesis and continue where I left off.

Craig

I started building a site to house Dan Shiffman’s amazing ICM videos. If you haven’t seen them yet, you can grab them HERE. To get the best quality video, you should download the vid(s) to your own machine and watch them locally. With the help of Steve “Ruby” Klise, the plan is to build the alpha site as a Sinatra App with DataMapper (Comm Lab Web), push to Heroku (Dynamic Web), store the vids on Amazon EC3 (Thesis?), and back everything up on Github (Everybody).

Next week I start my fellowship with IAC at Vimeo, which I’m looking forward to. Lately I’ve been busy putting together a promo video for the NYU Entrepreneurship Festival, which is happening early November. The video should be posted in a week or two and will have ample ITP representation. Stay tuned.

And, without further delay, your moment of Zen:

Why Facebook is moving away from HTML5 – Jan 2011 Facebook CTO  said they were going all in on HTML5 for mobile. Now, they’re claiming this was a mistake and going native. Why? What happened? Here’s a post from Facebook engineer Tobie Langel offering some technical insight.

Beginners Guide to Twitter API with Python and Terminal – If you’ve never worked with Twitter data, Python, or Terminal, this is a great post/tutorial that takes you through a step-by-step process to grab tweets from the Twitter streaming API and storing them in a file (CSV) on your machine.

Olympics Twitter Data Sculpture – by Emoto

Teux Deux - Every morning I seem to need/wantI to make a quick list of all the things to do that day. This app helps. It’s not an all in one solution, but it does one thing well, and I like it.

Eric

I ran a number of shop safety sessions last week, and we are almost completely done with those. If you have not signed up for a shop safety session, expect an e-mail this next week. For those who haven’t heard, the laser cutter is back to functioning in full, and I took some time this week to watch the repair happen in preparation for working on ITP’s Lasersaur, an open source laser cutter. I was also tasked these past two weeks with an increase in MakerBot maintenance do to more people printing 3d objects on the floor. Both the PComp and ICM sessions I attended moved along smoothly, and the end of my week has been hectic with last minute Maker Faire preparations for my project Cycle. Hope to see everyone out this weekend at Maker Faire!

Some Puppet Love: Cookie Monster and Grover perform their own musical

And I can’t stop thinking about surfing, so here is a great video shot just a few miles from here: Rockaway Opera

Genevieve

The past two weeks have been full of workshops and office hours at ITP. Lia, Merche, Craig and I have been adding info to the Video help pages, as well as organizing workshops on helpful tips for video shoots. Antonius and I led an introduction to Illustrator last week, and had a second workshop today on outputting from Illustrator to the various 2D fabrication tools we have on the floor, like the newly operational laser cutter and the embroidery machine. Lia and I led an ICM help session last week, and the questions I’ve been getting during office hours have impressed me with how much students have been able to absorb in such a short time. With Marina at ISEA last week, Gabe and I held the first Crit Group, and heard from two Big Screens projects, which made me pretty excited for this year’s show already. I just came from the IAC and saw the new video wall for the first time, which looks pretty amazing and is way more visible during the daytime than it was before, so that’s a plus for students as they develop their projects. I also filled in for Marina in her Renatured class, and gave a talk about the role of data visualization in different time periods and cultures, and artistic practices. The David Rumsey map collection is an amazing resource for maps and infographics throughout history. I also really enjoyed learning about stick maps, which are navigational tools used in the Marshall Islands.

In light of my thesis research, I found this NY Times article encouraging. Changing the fees the exchanges charge to correspond to data rates (to account for all of the cancelled orders) instead of the amount of executed trades seems reasonable to me. Hopefully this might curb some of the more erratic HFT behavior.

Yesterday I helped the Nerdy Derby crew get their gear out to the New York Hall of Science for Maker Faire. All went smoothly on the way over, but I did end up getting stopped at a checkpoint near the Midtown Tunnel. Luckily the van was empty at that point. Apparently if I don’t get a NY state license before the next time that cop stops me in a UHaul I’ll be getting a summons…

But anyway, come out to Maker Faire this weekend and check out Tangible Lights, a project I’m working on with Emily Webster (ITP’12) and Mustafa Bagdatli (ITP’10). We’ll be in the ZONE A VISCUSI area, aka the dark room.

Lia

Very busy with help sessions and office hours this week, particularly ICM on Mondays/ Thursdays and Video on Thursday. If you haven’t been to a workshop, we upload all code to our Github Page, so check those out.

This was my week of sitting in more classes, like Dynamic Web and 3D Sensing. I probably won’t be able to keep this up, but it was nice to pick up some new things and see what the students were coming up with. Cleaned up some of the more outdated pages from the Video section of the Help Wiki (“Where to get cheap video tapes in Manhattan”, “Record 30 seconds of color bars first!”).

Continued development work with Chien Yu Lin and Anna Pinkas  for Anna and Carlin Wragg’s Storywalks at Eldridge St. iPhone app which we are writing in openFrameworks. Met with Tom Igoe and his former student, Kenny Chiou, about making a mobile, Phonegap-based version of a data-collecting app for field research, a project that was started in Tom’s Monkey Tracking class years ago.  Went to the Dentist. Watched all of Firefly again, for the 3rd time. Going to the Resident’s Show tonight at Dumbo see you guys there!

iOS, for Artists: C4 is a brand new creative-coding framework lets you build expressive user experiences and create works of art.

The first episode of Astroboy, subtitled.

Merche

I have a white board on my table! A little shifted though, but it gives somehow a special touch to this 120cmx80cm surface (yes, I still prefer the Metric Unit System..)

Nick and I finished the second round of Audio Workshops, this time in basics on editing, with the inestimable help of our Pro Tools guru on the floor, Phan.

With Lia, Genevieve and Craig we have been preparing the video ones, that we started yesterday, and updating the video help pages…so a lot of diving again in the equipment available in the ER and its manuals Cole Haan…and discovering such things as we have a Giga Pan!

In NIME very powerful ideas for the final project seem to be taking shape after this third round of instruments. Still no luck with the Venue hunting, though..

Finally I’m helping  Antonius with some tutorials for the Soft Lab machines.

And outside the office I have been spending some time in some Perch displays installed in Cole Haan stores and some sound reactive visuals that I will present in collaboration with the Brazilian Sound Artist Thessia Machado next Saturday the 6th October in Local Project Art Space, part of DystorTorpia Media Project

To go:

http://issueprojectroom.org/drupal/event/sergei-tcherepnin

and of course don’t miss Dumbo Arts Festival and Maker Faire this weekend!

To read:

http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/home3.html

To listen:

Loops!!! : http://www.radiolab.org/2011/oct/04/

Mimi

Subbed for Matt Parker’s ICM section on Strings and Mouse/Keyboard interaction (fun!) which generated this set of silly text-based animations. Because of that I have finally committed the various Processing text/font syntax to memory.

Building a repo of examples for an upcoming workshop on “de-mystifying” Processing’s various m*th and geometry-related functions.

Have already lost a significant portion of my lifespan to figuring out how to make uploaded images show up in the wiki.

All 6 screens running in the lounge now! Team effort.

Sat through 4.5 hours of Einstein on the Beach (no intermission) and then 4 hours of Turandot (1.5 hours of intermission) in a single week.

About 4 hours into Einstein this happens:

This “Bed” of light took about 5 minutes to go from 180 to 90 degrees. Never before have I contemplated whether something had reached 45-degrees or not for such a length of time.

Nick

On the sound front, Merche and I finished up the audio help sessions with Phan’s help and I’ve been meeting with people during office hours about audio projects. We’ve been discussing some exciting new audio equipment purchases with Rob and will do some additional help sessions once it’s here. Physical computing help sessions are happening (Thursdays 4-5pm) and have been lots of fun come and join us if you’re having trouble with something or just want some support while you work through the labs. I’m putting together some p-comp sessions on specific subjects as well that should be helpful as people work towards their first projects. NIME continues to be exciting still communicating with potential venues to nail down a location.

I’m delighted that the ITP laser cutter is back (thanks John & Eric!). I’m cutting a lot of mechanical parts for a sound installation piece going up at New York Hall of Science next month.

some links:

Steve

The past two weeks have seen a lot of students at my office hours (there’s still plenty of slots available!), which has been great. There were a few questions from the Visualizing JS class so I read through the syllabus and am really envious of everyone in the class. In Stewart’s notes for the class he linked to the hilarious Wat talk from Gary Bernhardt. (If you also want to have a Javascript REPL in your Terminal like in the video, click here)

I finally finished the write up of the Git workshops from the second week of classes. You can read it here, and please do. If you have questions on anything in the post, leave a comment. On Tuesday I held a tutorial on branching and collaborating with Git. Maybe due to the hour or that all the first years were at Applications there were very few people there. Expect another similar talk soon. For that talk I compiled a list of Git resources.

Our Residents’ Github page is filling up with some great examples. Even if you don’t understand Git yet, go look at our page and click through to read the code, see the examples. [http://github.com/itpresidents](http://github.com/itpresidents]