ITP RESIDENTS

Residents’ Digest #01

Craig

Hey everyone,

Every other Friday, we’ll be posting a “Residents’ Digest” where each of us will offer a brief description of what we’re up to in and around ITP, as well as some useful, interesting, entertaining or just random links we think are worth sharing. Here goes, hope u enjoy!

- The Residents

ANTONIUS:  I got to relive some of my favorite ITP memories this past week by presenting The Pool to the new Big Screens students and by documenting the first assignment instruments for NIME. Eric Rosenthal sent me this great tutorial on making solder masks for PCBs with UV paint, which I hope to incorporate into the Soft Lab tutorials. Speaking of which, Merche and I ran the first Soft Lab workshop on sewing with conductive materials. It’s hard to open up to strangers, but I read a short story to a mixed group of ITP, Performance Studies, Steinhardt and Gallatin students for the class Nancy Hechinger and Anna Deavere Smith co-teach on Sundays. I’m assisting them with the tech, but they are kind enough to treat me as if I were one of the students. I’m lucky enough to participate in another awesome performance class – Puppets with Ithai! For our first assignment, Marianne, Eric Hagan and I performed a short skit with two grumpy friends and a butterfly who didn’t know how to fly. Considering the growing number of performance courses associated with ITP, I suggested to the faculty we consider reserving rehearsal space close to the floor. They’re taking the request seriously and thanks to George Agudow’s infinite wisdom and connections it may come to fruition soon. Hold tight!

CRAIG:  The first two weeks of school have been great. Steve and I successfully carved out what appears to be a useful tetris piece for our corner of the Residents’ office. Besides building furniture, I’ve been working with Dan Shiffman on the ICM Video project. We’re still in a preliminary phase, but we’re excited about the possibilities. And we’d love your feedback, so please let us know what you think. I’ve aso been helping out with the ICM and Git workshops. Next week, Steve, Mimi, and I are starting a weekly Web Dev workshop every Wednesday from 2-4pm. (And for every Residents’ workshop, we’re posting documentation to this blog.)

I’m also sitting in on Stewart Smith’s “Visualizing Javascript”, which is going to be an epic class. and I added a “Shep” command, “Shep give me love” – give it a try once Steve lets “Shep” run loose again on ITP.

And some links:

The DataGotham Conference – is happening today (09/13) and tomorrow (09/14). They’re live streaming the event, and will hopefully post vids once it’s done. Def worth checking out.

The Setup - aka usesthis.com a site about what people use to get stuff done.

Envisioning The Future of Health Tech – a nice infographic looking at the future of health technology.

Kinetic Art - this relaxes me every time I watch.

ERIC:  I would say that my desk has also been finished, but I have in mind that there will always be room for new growth. I’ve been busy keeping an eye on the shop and the new tools, including a number of new drills, a much better scroll saw, and various other smaller parts. I’ve running both 1st and 2nd years through Shop Safety sessions, sign up on shop.itp.nyu.edu for next week if you haven’t attended one this year. Once everyone has attended a basic shop safety, I will begin to host sessions on using the Laser Cutter, CNC, and Makerbot.

I’ve also been very excited about Ithai Benjamin’s Puppets class. We worked together before class on Wednesday to create a stage which the class will modify over the course of the semester, with plans to add a curtain and lights. I worked with Marianne and Antonius for the first puppet performance and with three vastly different puppets we were able to come together and create a compelling story.

An awesome rolling ball kinetic sculpture built using K’nex:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q76r-3z4Ckk

An interesting video on a simplified explanation for encryption:

http://www.wimp.com/howencryption/

New York City Archive makes available 2.2 million images of the city dating back to the early 1800s:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134408/Never-seen-photos-100-years-ago-tell-vivid-story-gritty-New-York-City.html#ixzz23LEgdR00

GENEVIEVE: I’m enjoying the classes I’ve been sitting in on – Understanding Networks, Renatured and the Art of Graphics Programming. If you didn’t get a chance to come to the Art Out last week (with Marina, Tom and Danny) to see the Ghosts in the Machine show at the New Museum, I recommend checking it out before it closes September 30th. I’ve been working with Crys and Ali to get Crit Group up and running, so if you’d like the chance to get a longer focused critique on a project (even in its very initial stages), please sign up at the Crit Group wiki, or just come out to listen and give feedback to your peers.

I also spent the week working on a project for Maker Faire, as well as making a photo booth for my friend’s wedding. It’s pretty satisfying to trigger a 5d by pressing a giant red button! And the residents’ office is also starting to feel a lot more comfortable now that our furniture is built and we have a Shep sound system.

Here’s a fun project I found in my survey of DIY photo booths, which reminded me a lot of the work of recent ITP grads Reed+Rader. I also came across some helpful javascript libraries for embedding Open Street maps into a website, which I’ll be using to build out a project I’m working on for a festival in SF coming up in October.

LIA:  Helped run the Documentation, Photoshop and ICM Help Workshops, which for the most part went well (if you don’t think so let us know — we are learning too!). I’ve been spying on the first week’s ICM homework, and am really impressed and excited by the incoming class. That said, I echo Steve’s comment that people have to start signing up for office hours if you need extra help. We get a huge variety of questions, everything from “for” loops to: “Where do I get free Photoshop?” (can’t say), and, “Do you have a pair of scissors in here?” (yes we do).

Outside school, Will & I revived some of our Video Sculpture projects for the giant Winkel &  Balktick party at the old Pfizer building in BK — an experience much like the ITP show except that your guests are all intoxicated. I’m also enjoying sitting in some classes within ITP, and signed up for some programming ones outside of ITP.

Yesterday I took down all the pictures with the faces of the class of 2012 from the front lounge to make way for new photos — a task that took longer than necessary because I kept stopping to reminisce. It goes by quickly, folks, don’t forget to stop and enjoy each others company

Learning to program at 30 - I google this topic a lot.

25 life saving tips for Processing - a good collection of snippets that would have saved me a lot of time.

Roll Your Own Front End - a survey of creative coding frameworks by some 2011 alum.

New York Times Graphics Editor Amanda Cox speaks at Eyeo - because she is great. Browse the other Eyeo videos too.

The Ramayana & Rubbish Books - some fun storytelling online

MERCHE:  It is been an intense week, still trying to figure out loads of things and mainly happy to be back! No white board top yet on my table though…lack of time

We have been working around NIME with Nick and Antonius and in that line I installed with Marlon the new audio system for the class which should be properly operating for next week, and enjoyed so much the performances of all NIMErs in their first exercise! We have been doing some research for the venues for the show too.

With Nick we hosted the second audio help session in Recording basics and have been going through all the audio equipment in the ER and updating the online information about it in the audio help page.
I also assisted Antonius in the Smart Crafting Workshop, which had a great response.
We had our first PComp help session with almost no students…wondering if the questions will arrive in the next days, so we are scheduling an extra one for Tuesday…Maybe Steve and Craig with sexy-github at the same time was too much to compete with!

Outside the office I have been working in the performance for Geekdownfestival, where I plan to use some pieces from my Thesis, some other instruments I developed in NIME class and a wearable piece that needed some re-tuning.

And keep on with my work in Potion, mainly around Perch project.

Some interesting sound related “to-go”:

+ Last Sunday I had the enormous pleasure of meeting Marjorie Eliot and her Parlor’s Jazz  sessions.  Can’t think of a better way to spend Sunday afternoon!

+ Coming in Eyebeam on Monday:  Music After Hours: CT-SWaM

+ Roulette and  The Stone agendas is always worth checking

+ And if you want to test and share your new audio/visual creations Share hosts open jam sessions every Sunday late afternoon/night (you can actually combine with Marjorie)

MIMI:  I found a piece of masonite that was exactly the dimensions of my desk. Drilled a lot of holes into the plywood wall with Antonius and Gennie most of which line up and cultivated a Garden of Eden of color-coded ethernet, DVI and power cables behind the Big Screens machines.  Figuring out how to be helpful with ICM without going TMI.

Some Links: