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Residents’ Digest #7
Craig
Antonius
Hello 2013! The year went off to a running start. I jumped into the ocean at Coney Island on New Year’s day for the fourth year in a row. Then I collaborated with artists Claude Wampler, Amelia Saul and John Tremblay to make a multimedia performance at the Kitchen. Thanks to everyone who made the show possible and my apologies to everyone who didn’t get tickets. But you still have a chance to see the body bags for animals that I sewed for Marina at her solo exhibition at bitforms. The other pieces she’s displaying in the show are exquisite, especially the animation she made with Dan Shiffman. Don’t miss it! And here’s another thing you shouldn’t miss: Big Screens is back at the IAC on March 1, 2013. I’ll see you all there!
In the Javanese Gamelan front, I started learning how to play sekaran (elaboration / flowering) for the bonang barung – the instrument which I soft-circuit-stitched onto my laptop sleeve for my thesis. Speaking of which, I hear that the Solder Stitch and Bitch club is starting up again. All of you should join.
And now some links:
Iris van Herpen’s 3D printed and laser sintered dresses.
Maison Martin Margiela’s foray into haute couture.
SHOWStudio’s latest fashion ads using 3D sensing and motion capture.
And Hussein Chalayan’s S/S13 brilliant illusory effects on fabric without using a single Kinect. Now that’s what I call fashion tech.
Craig
Hello, hello. Break was great and relaxing. Went home to Los Angeles for the X-Mas – New Years stretch, spent some quality outdoor time in Joshua Tree and Palm Springs. I highly recommend the Ryan Mountain and Indian Canyons hikes as well as a quick visit to Pioneer Town if you’re ever in the neighborhood.
Came back to NYC early January and hit the ground running. Sat in on Dan Shiffman’s NYU Abu Dhabi Nature of Code class (we visited the Museum of Math, it was awesome), worked with Shawn Van Every to re-designing “Shiffman Studios” sans post-production, and made tons of progress on my work at Vimeo (express 3.0 and paper.js).
The semester is shaping up to be jam-packed. Excited to be working with Katherine Dillon and all the 2nd years in thesis this semester. I’ll also be supporting CommLab Web again, definitely sign up for office hours if you need any help.
And now, you should take a look at these:
The Future According to Google’s Eric Schmidt
Y-Combinator Backs Its First Non-Profit – WATSI.or
NY Times Launches TimeSpace: A 4 Month Media-Biz Incubator
DARPA’s 1.8 GigaPixel Camera
Eric
Welcome back everyone! It’s amazing to realize that we are already into February of 2013! I’ve been busy through January finishing the Lasersaur (it’s first cut, the lasersaur logo, is attached to the case). We are 95% of the way there, with just the exhaust and air assist steps to go (mostly so we don’t have any fire issues). I also set up our brand new Replicator 2 Makerbot 3d printer! It’s in the J-room next to the original Replicator, definitely worth trying out (and if you are not sure how, keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming 3d printer workshop!) Thesis has started off quite strong, and both this week and last I’ve spent a fair amount of time meeting with 2nd years to discuss project worries and excitement. I’ve also started helping Tom Igoe record Physical Computing lecture videos similar to the ICM and Nature of Code videos.
And now a whole lot of links, stay warm and dry everyone!
Fishy Thoughts
The Water Main Break flooding 23rd st N/R Station
Laser Origami Fabrication Machine
Pilotable Robots from Japan
Mini hackable drones but don’t try to sell the results to Charlottesville, Va or Seattle, Washington
Genevieve
Over break I got the chance to spend some time with family back on the West Coast, and aside from coming down with a bad case of the flu, I had a lovely time. Since coming back I’ve been busy working on projects and trying to get things ready for some festivals and talks coming up soon. On February 19th I’ll be presenting my work at SUNY Stonybrook at a panel organized by Melissa Clarke (ITP 2011). Shimpei Takeda, Frank Nitshe, and Adam Harvey (ITP 2010) will also be speaking. It would be great if anyone can make it out to Long Island, but we’re hoping to have a livestream link for those who wants to tune in remotely.
I’m looking forward to attending a performance this coming Wednesday of work by Tyler Coburn, who is doing a series of performances at the Google building’s data centers on 111 8th Ave. I’m also hoping to check out the Blues for Smoke exhibition at the Whitney soon. One great thing about working at the IAC is that I’m right in the middle of Chelsea, so I’ve been spending my lunch breaks going to galleries. Francis Alys at David Zwirner is fantastic (unfortunately coming down today), and Dieter Roth at Hauser and Worth is definitely worth a visit.
It’s been great being involved with Thesis this semester. I’ve loved hearing about what everyone’s doing, and look forward to seeing how their ideas start coming to life. I’m working with Nancy’s group along with Antonius, but filled in for Lia last week and spoke with Kathy’s group about their projects. Merche, Lia, Nick and I have also been organizing openFrameworks workshops. Unfortunately we had to cancel our last one due to the blizzard but we’re going to reschedule it for Monday evening.
For some nerd kicks type this into Terminal: traceroute 216.81.59.173
Lia
During the break I travelled to Coron, Cebu, and Manila in the Philippines, Bangkok in Thailand, Siam Reap in Cambodia, Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan, with some day trips to Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing. I hadn’t been home (to the Philippines) since I started ITP in 2010, so it was great. I had a tearful reunion with my dog. I unfortunately injured my arm after falling off a man-made bridge in the tropical isles on the 2nd day of the new year. A nice man in a tiny hospital in Coron Town yanked my wrist in place and put a cast on it. I finally had surgery on it a few days ago, which is why I haven’t been around/ haven’t been replying to emails (sorry). I was probably asleep. I’m up and about now, though still trying to adjust, so please forgive me if I seem not all there. All of the above was typed with one hand.
Merche
I spent most of the break touring around my home country, solving VISA issues (yes, again) and having nonsense “conversations” with little people. I am doing some valuable discoveries about interactivity and children:
*Having a soft-foot sampler with sound of animals at the age of one doesn’t necessarily turn you into the coolest kid in the kindergarten. And you may have a serious panic attack due to schizophonia
*Trying to sleep next to a huge red squeezable apple that sings a cover of Monty Python can be quite a challenge for someone under 6 months
Apart form that I was happy to verify that, in spite of the unfortunate situation that the country is going through, there are still some very interesting initiatives and art centers pushing forward despite the cut backs. Now, more than ever, is a time to be creative in that way, and that is something that Hangar is managing to do. If you visit Barcelona you may wanna check their agenda. Also Matadero in Madrid, where Medialab Prado is temporary located, has an overwhealming cultural agenda as well.
In terms of work and personal projects I have been working for the French artist Antoine Catala in an installation using kinect and oF that he will be presenting in several exhibitions in Europe during 2013 and I also designed a Visual Application in MAX/Jitter for some installations and Performances that Phill Niblock is doing during these months in (Contemporary Art Centre Lausanne – http://www.circuit.li/ ) and the Musée de l’Elysée (the national museum devoted to photography – http://www.elysee.ch/ )
Since I landed in NY I have been REALLY enjoying covering all my clothes in sawdust for the collaboration I am doing with sound artist Thessia Machado. We are working in a sculptural platform for the exchange of musical events in a semi-conducted improvisation that we will do in March….veeeeery excited about that!! I will report more details about the show when it comes. And that means I need to rescue part of my Thesis from closet.
Talking about Thesis, being the resident coupled with Oranges and Gabe is being just great. I am thrilled with the type of projects and people in my group and I have been trying to help them in their research during this first week.
In the resident’s office we are figuring out what are the areas should be covered with workshops supporting different classes offered. So far we are diving in oF and I am waiting to see if students will need some basic ones in MAX/MSP to follow Luke’s class, though there have been different drive-bys on that recently offered.
Also, in case you missed it last December, we created a channel gathering all the NIME2012 performances in here. More of them coming soon.
Finally next Saturday 16th of February I have been invited to do some intervention in the gallery Ventana244 with the piece “Strings” that Monica Bate, Johann Diedrick and Luisa Pereira are showing there during this month.
And with all this going on I haven’t been able yet to check what is going on in the city! If you are mentally ready I would recommend to see Amour, the last Haneke movie and in case you missed it during Christmas, Holy Motors (Leos Carax) is a festival of stimulus.
Enjoy the snow!!
Mimi
Holimoli the semester started fast. Thesis is so much more fun from this end of things, listening and helping and working together with Georgia instead of stressing about my own project! Went to see Antonius’ show at The Kitchen which was a trip. I kept wanting to giggle but the audience was taking it all so seriously! I was glad to know afterwards that I was supposed to be laughing.
Narrowly missed Merche in Spain over break which was downright bucolic 
and had a typically passive-aggressively-hilarious time in London where I spent 3 hours in Parliament listening to Minister Pickles (yes that is actually his name) explain about Minister Pickles’ 50 Ways To Save Money to the Liberals. This was the best picture I could find of aforementioned Pickles on the interwebs.
Also, did you know that while it’s relatively easy to figure out what Latitude you are by looking at the position of the sun in the sky, it was really hard to figure out Longitude or rather it was really easy to make cumulative errors with Longitude which is how Columbus thought he had made it all the way around to India when he was really only half-way there. Makes sense I think, because the earth’s rotation means that if you have an inaccurate clock (which was what clocks were in cave-times) being off by an hour mean being off by a whole timezone’s worth of longitudiness! How cool is that!
Nick
Great to be back in the swing of things. I’m excited to be working with Heather Greer’s thesis class this semester and helping run the openFrameworks help sessions with Lia, Merche and Genevieve. Over break, I had a chance to dive into working on my thesis from last year, a robotic music toolkit, a bit more as well. I prototyped some new modules and produced a circuit board for the control electronics. I sent the design out to both Batch pcb and OSH Park — good resources for small run prototyping. On the whole, I’d say OSH was easier to deal with their boards are definitely more purple.
My friend Rutherford has opened up a great shop in Soho called “We Buy White Albums” to showcase his massive collection of the Beatles’ eponymous 1968 record. I’ve been helping him with the technical aspects of the project, including some software to create a composite version of all the covers (many of which are not so white after all these years).
All of Agnes Varda’s wonderful documentaries are streaming FREE until Feb 17th!!!!
Astonishingly beautiful Shugo Tokumaru video made with CNC cut pieces
What turns out not to be a medieval rocket cat but something more sinister
Steve
Welcome back to second semester. Over break I took a day or two off but mostly worked on the Thesis Site, which is so far going quite well. Believe it or not the entire site is a series of Sinatra apps with DataMapper, check out the code on Github. Ali and I got very close to connecting NYU authentication to Ruby web apps. The start of an app is here, hopefully before another week goes by we’ll have gotten to the bottom of this and all the second years will be able to log in to the thesis site using your NYU passwords. If you’re wondering how dragging images into the page works, I followed this blog post to get that working.
Every few weeks someone asks for all the student pictures, I had a little ruby script I would run to download the pictures and I spent some time making it more robust so that anyone could use it and pass in options. I put it here. You’ll still need to talk to either Ahmad or I for a CSV of the directory information but then you can run this script and get everyone’s pictures as often as you want.
I spend a good deal of time thinking about online publishing and since the last digest two sites just got massive redesigns: New Republic and A List Apart. The common theme seems to be to put only a few articles on the front page and leave room to breathe.
And now a ton of links:
Atlas of True Names
Courier Prime
Open Source Minecraft-like Engine in the Web
Vagrant
NY, NY
The proper way to watch the Star Wars movies.
Advice technical speakers
Customizing Hold and Press in Mountain Lion
