Camp this year is starting off with a (Big) Bang! ITP will be hosting a Science Hack Day in conjunction with the 2013 Word Science Festival. The World Science Festival routinely gets over 200k visitors and showcases projects and scientists on the cutting edge of research, design, and art. Science Hack Day is organized by [...]]]>

Camp this year is starting off with a (Big) Bang! ITP will be hosting a Science Hack Day in conjunction with the 2013 Word Science Festival. The World Science Festival routinely gets over 200k visitors and showcases projects and scientists on the cutting edge of research, design, and art. Science Hack Day is organized by ITP’s resident physicist and citizen science guru Francois Grey. The hack day is a great place to pitch a project, get collaborators, or most of all…get inspired!

SCHEDULE:

Saturday, June 1
9:00 AM:  Check-in and Breakfast
10:00 AM: Lightning Talks (scientists pitch their proposed hacks)
11:30 AM – 10:00 PM:  Hacking

Sunday, June 2
9:00 AM:  Check-in and Breakfast
10:00 AM – 8:00 PM: Hacking
8:00 PM: Presentations & Awards

Day 1 Workshops:
ITP Prototyping Tools Workshop
Arduino Workshop

Day 2 Workshops:
3D Printing Workshop
Balloon Mapping Workshop

Register here and find out more info here.

Do you have so many ideas that you don’t know where to begin?

ITP Camp is a great experience for anyone who has an idea (or a bevy of them) and needs a [...]]]> Had an idea for a project that you haven’t had a chance to make, but can’t get it out of your mind?

Do you have so many ideas that you don’t know where to begin?

ITP Camp is a great experience for anyone who has an idea (or a bevy of them) and needs a playground (and on hand experts) to make that idea come to life. Every year camp ends with the Camp ‘Show’, where campers get to see their ideas ‘take shape’ and have a beer or two to celebrate.

Why ITP Camp? from ITP Camp on Vimeo.

Each fellow will be working on a project and will be posting their progress as their work develops.  They will also be holding workshops for camp community members. Here’s [...]]]> Announcing the first ever ITP Camp Camp fellows! We had so many great applications, narrowing them down was a hard decision. Thank you to everyone who applied!

Each fellow will be working on a project and will be posting their progress as their work develops.  They will also be holding workshops for camp community members. Here’s a synopsis of the Fellows and what they intend to work on:

Matthew Carey

is a cross-disciplinary creative who creates interactive musical experiments. Matthew’s project, Aria Ad Infinitum, is a generative music piece that is perpetuated infinitely using a soprano voice, video, and code. The ‘database’ consists of an extensive video library of a professional soprano singing the top 100 words found in Italian Arias at every possible pitch, duration, and inflection. The clips are then processed through an algorithm that will ‘compose’ an infinitely varying Aria performance. The result is an entrancing melodic challenge to our traditional notions of composition, performance, math, and beauty. You can also see more of Matthew’s work on his vimeo page. Matthew is developing 2 workshops for campers: ‘Beat Making for Babies’ or ‘fool proof music making for your computer’; and ‘AFK – Analog Inspiration’ or making music out from behind the computer.

Jen Liu

Jen works as an Education Associate for Young Audiences/Arts for Learning, holds workshops with FutureMakers, works with Greenpants (an activist-arts group), AND works with Luminous Interventions doing large scale outdoor projection bombing. Somewhere between all this, Jen will begin developing Eyes on the Road: Smart Clothing for Cyclists. A long time cyclist, Jen is interested in creating prototypes for cycling specific clothing that incorporate electronics to increase visibility and safety for the cyclist in an urban landscape. Jen will also hold an Intro to Soft Circuits workshop for campers. See Jen’s work here.

Christina Jenkins

Christina teaches design, cartography, and feminism (among other things) at the NYC iSchool. Outside of school, Christina creates indie comics and is interested in exploring pop up engineering and soft circuit technology to bring back to her classroom as learning tools. For camp, Christina is developing an interactive pop up book, entitled FRIED,  to teach folks about electricity. In conjunction with her project/interests, Christina will be holding a workshop on soft circuits and pop ups. View Christina’s portfolio here

Leba Haber Rubinoff

Leba is cofounder of Mobile Movement, and Panty Raiders a collective of “girls ambushing the media”. Leba’s project, Mapping a Movement, is a  3D map that combines quantitative data and storytelling about technology/entrepreneurship  in an interesting, moving and beautiful map. Using 3D printing and projection mapping, the project explores interesting ways to share quantitative data, as well as telling stories that will make the data come to life.  Leba’s workshop is entitled Collaborative Mobile Design for International Development and will  look at the work of several innovative mobile-based solutions including Khan Academy, Carnegie Mellon’s Mobile and Immersive Learning program, Mobile Movement, which began as a project of Microsoft Research India and UN HABITAT.

Bert Balcaen

is currently a Master’s student at the Institute for Advance Architecture in Barcelona and is interested in maps and way-finding. Bert’s project, The Barcelona Metro Time Travel Map, is an exploration of the city from the point of view of a subway station, transforming physical distances into spans of time. Bert will be holding a workshop on using D3, a free/open source data viz took kit for javascript, for making beautiful/interactive data visualizations for web pages. Bert’s blog

Andrew Paulus

Andrew is a product manager for startup Savored, co-organizer of the NY Quantified Self meetup, as well as occasional wheel thrown potter.  Andrew’s project is entitled Slightly Chilly, and is a project to improve decision making for situations where personal preferences and external forces intersect. Possibly a website app, possibly a wearable, Slightly Chilly is a practical weather forecast tool that recommends what clothing you should wear depending on the weather,  and allows you to provide feedback and personalize these settings so that you end up with a perfect guide for what you should wear every day. During camp, Andrew will give a talk on the Quantified Self, helping campers to not only better understand the landscape, but to hack together their own QS projects as well. Andrew’s website

Grayson Earle

Grayson is a current MFA candidate at Hunter College. In addition, he teaches web design at Hunter and is gearing up to teach Processing at DCTV this summer. Grayson’s past recent projects include the Regret Project and The Illuminator, and projection bombing Occupy infinity group. Grayson has proposed to work on Persistance of Vision Urban Laser Projection (PULP). PULP is a physical computing project that attempts to bring together street art and digital art. Using high powered lasers and mirrors, PULP attempts to solve some of the existing technical limitations associated with large scale public projections. While at camp, Greyson will hold a workshop entitled Re-wiring for Re-cycling, which is a MacGyver style approach to using discarded materials for physical computing projects. Greyson’s website

Jonathan Nesci

Hailing from Montreal, Jonathan is a designer/coder who’s recent work deals with event design and interactive installations. For camp, Jonathan is furthering his story-telling project  Tell-a-Tree NYC. Tell-a-tree gives voice to the stories secretly witnessed by the trees in our city parks. Using wireless networking, Arduino, and the web, Tell-a-Tree  uses various recorded fragments,  played by different trees, to tell a greater story, built on those previously ‘missed’ memories. During camp, Jonathan will hold a workshop designed to help technologists develop compelling stories behind their projects. View more of Jonathan’s work at http://jcnesci.com/jcnesci2013a/.

Erica Gorochow

Eric works with with studios, agencies, startups, and many others on direction, design, and animation. In addition to her many side projects, she also runs a salon for creatives entitled Work in Progress Party. For Camp, Erica is working on 2 projects: Kord and WebToons. Kord is a game that challenges color and sound perception under a time crunch. WebToons, is a long term project (born from Camp past that takes web programming languages and turns them into cartoon characters. Erica will be holding an introduction to After Effects workshop for campers. Check out Erica’s work here

Takafumi Ide

Takafumi is a lecturer and Instructional Support Specialist at Stoney Brook University as well as installation artist. Takafumi’s project, Aftersound (tentative title), uses pressure sensitive non-electrical materials to represent a remembrance of a memory of a loved one through visual and sound effects. The project will track individuals footsteps through space, and playback the video and sound in a beautiful and ephemeral way. While at camp, Takafumi will give an artist talk of his past work. Check out his blog here.

Camp Coordinator Crys checking in. Camp is a great place to develop ideas and meet collaborators. ITP alum Michael Zick Doherty and Camp alum Amit Kumar are the co-founders of Bitponics, a hydroponics startup based in Brooklyn (for which I intern). Michael and Amit met on the ITP floor during Camp, [...]]]>

Camp Coordinator Crys checking in. Camp is a great place to develop ideas and meet collaborators. ITP alum Michael Zick Doherty and Camp alum Amit Kumar are the co-founders of Bitponics, a hydroponics startup based in Brooklyn (for which I intern). Michael and Amit met on the ITP floor during Camp, a couple of years ago. “I was working on some laser cutting one day. I noticed  (Amit) was working on making a vertical hydroponic system. He also mentioned he was working on automating the system. I had been working on the same idea for my Living Systems class the previous semester, so we said we should join forces,” said Michael, who now works on the hardware side while Amit works on the software side for Bitponics. After receiving a  $2000 scholarship from The Open Hardware Summit, they decided to get serious , and launched what would become a successful KickStarter and eventually a company.

The mission of Bitponics is to make home gardening easy and accessible to urban dwellers, similar to  Window Farms where Michael previously interned. Their idea is to create an automated system so that users have a better understanding of what is going on with their plants and how better to grow them.  In addition to the products the are in R&D and production, Michael and Amit are working to spread the message to the general public via workshops. Next weekend (April 13th), Michael is running a workshop on how to construct and maintain a sub-irrigated planter system. You can sign up here!

Bitponics launches this Spring, sign up for the mailing list here !

Bitponics is just one of the many great stories that come out of ITP Camp. Keep checking back for more awesome updates on campers and camp.

Third time camper Laurie Frick gave an awesome talk on art and self-surveillance at TEDx Austin this past February.  Last summer, Laurie spent her time at camp (among other things) working on a monumental ‘tracking drawing’ using the ITP laser cutter.

“Walk 51 in 16 panels” 8 ft x 10 ft, 300 lb [...]]]>

Third time camper Laurie Frick gave an awesome talk on art and self-surveillance at TEDx Austin this past February.  Last summer, Laurie spent her time at camp (among other things) working on a monumental ‘tracking drawing’ using the ITP laser cutter.

“Walk 51 in 16 panels” 8 ft x 10 ft, 300 lb Arches watercolor paper, lasercut. 2012

Check out more of Laurie’s work here.

This past summer, we asked Laurie how she defined camp:  It’s a chance to make stuff up and dream and explore. It’s this intense research time.The last two years, I’ve come up with really good ideas. Like…big ideas. Like.. whole installation ideas.” We also asked her what, if any, advice that she had for future campers. She SO eloquently responded: “Close your eyes, write the check, just come”.  

Yep. Can’t argue with that.

What exactly IS ITP Camp? Who better to tell you than our campers!

ITP Camp is ‘A playground with a bunch of awesome equipment and really great people who are doing stuff that you’ve never thought of before’.

Its ‘an experiment of putting together people from different background to create a total mess of [...]]]>

What exactly IS ITP Camp? Who better to tell you than our campers!

ITP Camp is ‘A playground with a bunch of awesome equipment and really great people who are doing stuff that you’ve never thought of before’.

Its ‘an experiment of putting together people from different background to create a total mess of technology and art”.

Basically, ‘ITP camp is more fun that ITP’.