“ Hi 
thanks for the Resident’s Digest. I didn’t use to read them last year but got into the habit this year and it’s great! ”
- Sara Al-Bassam (ITP 2013)
“WOW! This is awesome.. I am going to spend the weekend following all your links!”
- Nancy Hechinger (teacher)
I met many students these past two weeks in and out of office hours, ranging from coding out some fun sketches to etching printed circuit boards. I apologize to everyone who I couldn’t get to, especially last weekend because I was so busy documenting Nancy Hechinger and Anna Deavere Smith’s amazing class. I have also been assisting the Big Screens students, including having to wipe one of the machines clean and setting up two render machines for the students to use. The IAC is treating me really well and I’m about to meet with marketing for a feasibility report before pitching my idea to the head honchos. One of my other duties is to help port an existing product to Windows 8 and Windows RT, so I’m excited to go to Microsoft’s event on October 26 at Pier 57. Fingers crossed they’ll give me a Surface! Last week, I finished the entire Hunger Games trilogy within a span of a few days. It was just too addictive. Now, while I wait for Grace Coddington’s memoir to be released, I’ve started The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. It’s a brilliantly executed novel, with an unapologetically Western tone despite being written by one of Japan’s definitive contemporary writers.
The semester is def in full swing and the days have been jam packed. Office hours are going well, it’s exciting to see the progress everyone is making. I’ve also been super impressed with the final projects coming out of the 2 unit courses including Comm Lab Web & Glitch. And can’t wait to see the finals for both Pop-Up Windows and Puppets.
I finally got my little Sinatra app to run locally with syncing video, more to come. Spent a day working with ITP adjunct Shawn Van Every re-thinking the video-recording setup for Shiffman’s office. We’re starting to create a real-time system where viewers can ideally interact with both live and recorded lessons. Speaking of the future of education, take 15 minutes and watch this talk by Seth Godin - Stop Stealing Dreams – “What is school for?”.
Steve and I went to the EmpireJS conference on Monday. John Resig, the author of jQuery, gave a great talk on the work he’s doing at Khan Academy. Dean McNamee’s talk on Plask was also great. He came by ITP this Friday to talk about the system, some projects, and his technical-design philosophy.
The Vimeo fellowship is progressing well. We’ve locked in on a idea surrounding “creative exploration.” Can’t wait to stop brainstorming and start making. First step will be digging into the Vimeo api.
The Andrew Bell Eyeo 2012 talk “The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Code” was finally posted. Andrew, the lead Cinder developer, makes some compelling arguments regarding the future of creative coding both academically and professionally.
And, check out this site - Texter – paint with text!
It’s been another busy couple of weeks with office hours covering processing, 3d printing, and other fabrication questions. The help sessions have also been progressing well. It seems that every week more and more people have been using the MakerBot 3d printer, so it has been an endless job to keep up with maintenance, help sessions, and 3d modeling questions. I recommend checking out this getting started with Rhino tutorial series, but it is also worth looking for models on thingiverse.
I have also made progress with the Lasersaur, attaching the power supply and water cooler, cleaning up the wiring, and tightening the timing belts The goal is that by the end of this Friday, Oct 26th to fire the laser itself!
In other news, the Puppet’s Class Halloween show is Kitchen Apocalypse Halloween night at 7pm, be sure and check it out in room 50!
Watch this absolutely amazing automaton narrative machine which is part of an exhibit on prohibition in Philadelphia and the surreal and self-reflexive Animator vs Animated Character Classic Looney Tunes “Duck Amuck,”
Read about an interactive laser cutter which lets you specify your cut by a laser pointer (thanks Doug)
Listen to Joburg Jam and Kadinchey by the remix artist Pogo.
Genevieve
The past two weeks have been quite busy. I went out to San Francisco for the Urban Prototyping Festival last Saturday, which was organized by the Gray Area Foundation, Intersection for the Arts and the City of San Francisco, and brought together artists, technologists, architects and other people making public interventions in the city. The Darkness Map made its debut at the festival, which is an ongoing project I’ve been working on that attempts to map nighttime luminosity in urban areas. You can participate in this experiment in crowd-sourced data collection by downloading an app to your Android device. The map is currently active in San Francisco, but a New York map will be coming soon, along with an app for iPhone.
At the festival I had the opportunity to speak on a panel about the role of open data in municipal government, and how we as citizens can initiate the creation of new datasets and projects to visualize them. Michal Migurski from Stamen Design described a project they’d done recently where they basically went out and tracked down information on how many people use private bus services to commute from city centers to tech campuses in Silicon Valley. Stamen tried to reach out to companies directly, but had to resort to figuring out how to create the dataset on their own after various tech companies declined to release the information. If you haven’t checked out Stamen’s work, they do a lot of with maps and data viz, including Oakland Crimespotting and Cabspotting. Sha Hwang, Shannon Spanhake and Jeff Risom were also on the panel, and all do really great work. Oh, and I saw Andrew Benson perform live visuals at the festival. You might know him from his Jitter Recipes.
Yesterday I also had my first day of work at the IAC, where I’ll be producing content for the video wall. I’m just at the initial stages of brainstorming, but I’m looking forward to working on that scale again, especially after seeing all the great stuff coming out of the Big Screens class so far.
I sent this link to the Renatured list, but thought I’d share it here. This man is doing really great work with aquaponics and social/environmental justice. I want to get a kit for the floor!
Midterms are afoot! Since I’m sure you just can’t get enough of us, here’s a SPECIAL RETROSPECTIVE on the midterms of years past (i.e, I stalked my fellow residents, here are their PComp midterms from Fall 2010– then titled, “Media Controller”. Enjoy). Mimi made a weather station with Christine and Matt. Genevieve made Tape Translations with Emily and Ju Yun. Nick and Merche made a kalimba and an airharp with Noah. Eric made Power Plant with Paul and Suzanne. Antonius made the Cool Master with Ahn and Guang (gotta watch this video, srsly), and Craig and I made Message in a Bottle with Anna, Martin, and Liza!
I’ve been getting a bunch of openFrameworks questions this week, so to tentatively start off a better processing-to-OF initiative, I’ve started translating example sketches from Processing to Open Frameworks, starting with the all-important bouncing ball and the ArraysOfObjects example that comes with processing. The examples are on github. I will keep adding more as the weeks go by, as well as updating the itpedia OF/ iphone/ mobile pages. If you have any processing sketches that you want translated, let me know and we can work on it together. As a matter of fact, if you have any interest in learning OpenFrameworks, for projects this semester or next, I’d love to hear from you. I’m putting together a quick-and-easy FAQ for Processing users who want to do a project or two in OF, but get stuck with simple questions like, “why isn’t my picture transparent?” or “how do I install a library?”. If you want to learn, come by office hours and I will teach you the basics. If you already know OF, I’d love to get your input on what would be valuable information for a beginner. Seriously — write me.
Speaking of OF, if you’ve used it before and haven’t yet downloaded the new version, do it! Aside from a bunch of great updates, it has a rockin’ Project Generator that should clear up about 30% of any headache that you used to have while learning OF.
Hey, if there was a permanent green screen station on the floor, would you use it?
This is already pretty long. How did it get so long? Does anyone actually read these? (Hi Will). Did you know that the first webcam was invented because of a coffee pot? Here’s a great table of animals sounds in different languages.
World-Class DARPA Robot Successfully Launches Through Obstacle Course Like A Drunken Sailor.
Merche
Uhaaaa….it’s been already two weeks??
Midterms and NIMERs have been bringing a lot of fun interesting questions and projects, so I have been doing some research to help them. There has been a lot of video editing this week too. There was a hole in the documentation history of NIME from the performances of last year, so I created in the ITP vimeo site a home for all of them and edited the ones missing…a lot of interesting memories from that day came back! Check them out here .
I am really excited about going to the studio this weekend for the final MIX for the soundtrack of the Storywalks project I mentioned in our last Issue, that I am working with all ITP alumni, including our dear resident Lia.
Some days ago in an art opening I had the greatest chat with this fabulous “luthier” and he did an amazing musical performance in the middle of the street with just a little strip of latex that he pulled out from his pocket. Worth checking out!
There are also some interesting performances coming in the next two weeks in Grace Exhibition Space, in Brooklyn and for Bill Moggridge’s fans there is this event in Symphony Space
Mimi
Made a quick trip to San Francisco where it was mostly rainy, but had one day of the most amazing clouds.
Starting to work with Antonius and Genevieve on credits and website for Big Screens.
Attended a recruiting event at the Columbia U Engineering School last night featuring a string quartet rendition of Bad Romance (Lady Gaga for those who need the context).
Take 2 on Photoshop workshop with Lia today which went much better than Take 1. Prepping with Craig for a how-to-debug workshop. It’ll be good times coming up with good examples of broken code for that.
People are coming in with challenging ICM questions which is giving me ideas for next round of Math Helper sessions.
In case you missed it, some dodo jumped from 24 miles above the earths and broke the sound barrier. (Mt. Everest is < 5 miles.)
It has been great to see the what people are working on for their pcomp media controllers. Happy to set up extra office hours if anyone is need of some extended help as they finish up.
I installed my new sound / data representation piece, New York City Immigration Song, at the New York Hall of Science for the Regeneration show (up through January). Here’s a quick video I shot of it in action. It represents Immigration to NYC based on U.S. census data and uses mechanically actuated piano wires to represent different paths of immigration. It maps distance to pitch and # of people to duration. A snare drum represents missing data points.
Speaking of mechanical music (as I often am), Saturday is the late Conlon Nancarrow’s 100th Birthday! Starting in the 1940s, Nancarrow wrote astounding music for player pianos by hand punching piano rolls with a custom made machine. He explored rhythmic and dynamic concepts that prefigured many aspects of electronic music. Here’s an extended interview with him from 1984.
At the ReGen opening, I chatted with the folks from Rockwell Lab about their new project Spacebrew, an open toolkit for creating interactive spaces using websockets. Looks exciting — they’ll be hosting workshops on the first friday of each month to introduce it. You can check it out and sign-up for updates here.
Woah, these last two weeks have been real busy. And you’ve made it to the last section of the Residents’ Digest, so here’s a little treat.
The first section of CommLab Web ended last week, it was awesome to see the great projects students were able to make in just 7 weeks. From embedding Ruby in Processing code to starting to explore Javascript and even starting to understand the cryptic world of CSS. Two Sundays ago there was an event at ITP as part of the LISA conference about the future of publishing and creating books in the internet age. Dan Shiffman and Rune talked about The Nature of Code (launching real soon), the Magic Book Project and what O’Reilly is working on similar to the Magic Book. Then Andrew Odewahn introduced the Liber Amicorum which is an open source book on Github that is a guidebook for creative coding. Matt Epler wrote a few pages in there, check it out and add to it!
This past weekend I attended the TenConf, where everyone who attends gives a 10 minute talk. Greg Borenstein, Patricia Adler and Paul May all gave great talks. The talks ranged from state machines to a summary of 50+ Star Wars novels to how and why to work entirely from coffee shops. I gave my talk on a Chrome extension I made to automatically like everything you see on Facebook.
Then on Monday Craig and I, and Jeremy Diamond went to EmpireJS, a day long conference all about Javascript. The most exciting talks were about using Node.js for hardware, Rick Waldron demonstrated controlling a walking Arduino robot with a library he wrote called Johnny Five. And Eli Insua demonstrated a CNC machine he built himself that is controlled with Javascript. And then Max Ogden talked about teaching Javascript to absolute beginners and his site Javascript for Cats. Check out his slides here.
On Tuesday Max, Eli and Mikeal Rogers came to ITP. Eric showed them the Lasersaur and CNC machine which got them real excited. Eli and I are hoping to get his javascript -> gcode program working well enough to bypass Mastercam.
You may have seen me around the floor flying a quadcopter. There’s going to be a lot more of that. The copter has a usb port and runs Linux, so the obvious next step is to attach an Arduino to it. Max and I were working on that yesterday, but don’t know a ton about serial ports. There’s an issue on Github about where we’re at.
Just some links:
http://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/pitch/
http://js.opentechschool.org/
http://eloquentjavascript.net/
Today I got to witness one very elated Steve Klise controlling a Parrot AR Quadricopter via JS.
Here’s a small Processing sketch to exhibit working with arrays of Objects. I’ve split the sketch up in to 2 sections, “setting” a Point to each position in the array and then going through the array and getting the object out of the array.
If you have any questions, please put them in the comments and I’ll do my darnedest to answer.
Antonius
Things are going well at IAC. I installed Windows 8 on my machine there and made my first app for Metro – a simple gif-animated limerick about my new developer friends. The other day, we ran into Jeremy Keith, lord of all things AJAX. He was asking where to get a good cup of coffee, so we pointed him to Stone Street Coffee on 9th Ave. I’m still in the process of updating the Soft Lab section of shop.itp.nyu.edu. Students can now reserve the machines to ensure that they can use it at any specific time the floor is open. Merche and I are making tutorials for all of the machines. We just did a workshop on how to use the vinyl cutter, and the written tutorial should be up soon. We also did a review on the computerized embroidery machine. The tutorial for that one is up here. I built two render machines for After Effects and Media Encoder for students. To learn how to access them, please sign up for office hours with me. It will be helpful for students in Big Screens and Open Source Animation. Speaking of which, I met Nick Fox-Gieg last week and we spent a good few hours talking about using the kinect for animation. He’s awesome! And I was flattered to find out he showed the animation I did for Saadi’s music video in his class. It’s finally fall, my favorite season. But my eyes have been on next season’s ready to wear Spring collections in Paris. Hot this year: Stripes are out, taxicab checkers are in. And remember, you can never have enough hats, gloves and shoes.
Craig
I started my Vimeo fellowship last week, which is looking extremely promising. Haven’t honed in on an area of focus just yet, but I’ve gotten to spend some time researching a range of areas and found some inspiring projects. In particular, I’ve been amazed by the work of Ji Lee (the nine project and word as image are great). Finally finished up the promo video for the 2012 NYU Entrepreneurs Festival, you can watch it HERE. And I’m looking forward to working more on the Sinatra web app for Dan Shiffman’s ICM videos. Hope to have an initial site up soon.
Also ran some Comm Lab workshops with Merche for production and editing. And I’ve been sitting in on Rune’s Web Dev class, excited to see the finals next week!
Big congrats to the Nerdy Derby crew for a great job at Maker Faire. Also want to give a shout out to 2012 alum Jeremy Scott Diamond for his work at the Bloomberg Visual Data group. They just launched their first project, def check it out.
Along the data viz line, Mike Bostock, the author of the javascript library d3 just posted over 300 examples with code on his blog.
This WebCam 3D Mesh is pretty rad.
Random biz story, earlier this week twitter acquired Vine, a tiny 3 person video company that never launched.
And if you haven’t already heard about it, this amazing Rain Room installation is showing in London right now.
Eric
The past two weeks have flown by. Maker Faire went well and it was nice to see so many ITP faces both past and present showcasing a sample of wonderful projects. Jody Culkin and I got back to working on the Lasersaur project, installing the power supply and marching ever closer to firing our 4ft. 100 watt laser.
In addition to physical computing and fabrication help, I’ve an increased interest in the MakerBot 3D printer both with 3D Sensing and Ideas taking Shape. I’ve been working on a comprehensive written guide to help people print their models in the future, and will then go on to make a basic guide for 3D model making. Look for this and other updates on the Shop website.
Sitting in Puppets class has continued to be a rewarding experience and this past week in addition to the class creating a plethora of interesting marionettes now hanging around the floor, Greg Barsamian came in to speak about his art practice and creating large scale 3D Zoetropes. If you haven’t seem them already, definitely worth checking out.
My obsession with surfing and building a surfboard has only increased in the past few weeks, and I have been eyeing the possibility for building myself either a CNC wood hollow or a cardboard surfboard.
I know this has already been posted multiple places, but the 3D printed optics coming out of Disney Research is amazing, and worth noting that the Objet 3D printer available at AMS is capable of printing the same translucent material if people have project ideas.
Genevieve
The past two weeks have been busy with help sessions and workshops, especially now that Big Screens is really getting into gear. I went over ways to create assets in Processing and use them in After Effects, so if you’re interested in that workflow for your projects I’m happy to go over it in office hours.
Last week I also got to visit the internet with the Understanding Networks class. And I don’t just mean loading the Google homepage. We got a tour of the zColo facilities at 60 Hudson St in Tribeca, a building where many of the network providers exchange traffic in New York City, and is one of the major internet traffic hubs in the world. It was really fascinating to see the infrastructure that makes all the virtual connections that we take for granted possible.
There will be an Art Out next Wednesday to the Met, so if you’d like to come, meet at ITP at 3:10pm, or uptown at 3:40. Also, sign up to receive announcements about ArtOuts at the blog. If you can’t make it when the group is going, feel free to check out the shows on your own time.
And in high frequency trading news, you may have heard that one HFT algorithm made up 4% of trading in the US stock market that week. In the time that it operated, it posted and cancelled millions of orders, without executing a single trade, taking up 10% of an exchange’s allocated bandwidth or an entire day.
Completely unrelated, but also pretty cool, here is a company that produces packing material entirely from mushrooms. Say goodbye to styrofoam.
Lia
I am starting to really enjoy Office Hours — am learning a lot by looking at how other people write code. Lots of Workshops, too: ICM, plus Video Shooting and Editing took up most of my time. Went to the Resident’s show in Dumbo, which was a lot of fun. It was great seeing them as a group and showing off their awesome work. I even took one of Rune’s Tiny Artists home: this one. I missed out on all the Maker Faire fun, but I did help pick 80+ pounds worth of apples in Virginia. I’ve also started taking an iOS development class outside school, which is a small step closer to that lofty dream we all have — actually finishing your thesis.
I stumbled onto the Disney Research site, and spend a good hour or two looking over the research projects. Start with this one: beautiful 3D printed optics. Advanced Capacitive Sensing makes everything a touch surface — including doorknobs. This is an interesting iphone + projector project that allows you to play your game on any surface you can project on — and interact with your characters via accelerometer and more. Finally, the tongue-joystick is just calling out to be integrated into an ITP project.
The great cinematographer Harris Savides away passed this week. If you haven’t yet heard his name you will know him by his incredible work. Some clips from a few films: Zodiac, Elephant, Birth.
Also, my friend Raya Martin’s films are screening next week at the Museum of the Moving Image. If you’ve never seen a Filipino film, Martin’s work is not typical of it, but very good — thoughtful and thought-provoking. Start with Independencia, which will show on the 19th.
Finally, a giant eyeball was found on a beach, mystifies marine biologists.
Merche
In terms of workshops we are running the last ones for comm lab – Video and Sound in video editing with Adobe Premiere, and I am looking forward to see all their final projects! Around NIME world we have the GREAT news of a venue confirmed and students have shot their instrument proposals. Nick & I worked on the video of their presentations on the last weeks. With Antonius we have been working in the tutorial for the embroidery machine, that we uploaded HERE and we are working now on one for the vinyl cutter.
In the “outside-ITP” world I have been recording some voices for the new album coming this year of the band LASERS from Barcelona and composing the “soundtrack” for the site-specific smartphone app Storywalks at Eldridge Street by ITP alums Carlin Wragg and Anna Pinkas.
Some links for the coming days:
Audiogram a unique interactive audio experience by Improv Everywhere designed for the South Bronx, 13th and 14th October
Haven’t got time yet to check this one in Bitforms gallery, but looks/sounds promising:
http://www.bitforms.com/current.html#id=160&num=6
Somewhere to get lost in Nostalgia..
http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/OskarFischinger
Mimi
Geometry sessions went way better than I expected
Last weekend of my highline installation. Going to try and catch some footage of it with today’s amazing cloud coverage. Re-flexing Processing-in-Eclipse muscles as people are beginning to get their hands dirty with MPE and Processing.
This footage of the earth from the International Space Station is pretty awesome.
Nick
Office hours and help sessions continue to be lively and fun. We’ve finalized the venue for NIME: Glasslands Gallery on Sunday December 9th — mark your calendars! I enjoyed seeing last year’s ITP Residents’ show at the Dumbo Arts Festival along with great work from other alums and students. We’re talking to the festival organizers about making this exhibition an annual tradition.
I have a piece in a show opening at the New York Hall of Science later this month There’s an opening reception Thursday Oct 25 from 6-9.
ITP alums Eszter Ozsvald and Sue Ngo just launched a Kickstarter for their compact, Arduino compatible microcontroller platform Heatit , designed for driving high current loads. Let’s get it funded!!! I helped do some testing with solenoids and provided music for the video.
Here’s A DIY youtube mashup of Terry Riley’s minimalist masterpiece “In C” and Cerrone’s disco anthem “Love in C Minor” (play both simultaneously, sit back, enjoy ride).
Steve
I also went to the Residents’ show at the Dumbo Arts Festival. It was great to go and see what they have all been working on and not just ask them to remind me how to wire up an LED. I went to MakerFaire, and ran into quite a few ITP students and alums and got to see the madness that was Nerdy Derby. I picked up a Raspberry Pi (that I don’t know what to do with) and an Arduino Leonardo.
This is a great article about the redesign of Microsoft.com. The design agency Paravel who worked on the site has some excellent jQuery plugins (scroll down). The new Microsoft might just give responsive web design the push it needs to become the way to make websites.
Last weekend in Berlin there was an event called NodeCopter, a day of Parrot AR Drones getting programmed by Node.js, Mikeal Rogers has a great write up of the event. We have a Parrot at ITP which I wanted to play around with after seeing this, but the battery charger is broken (Which is a really lame problem to have in the goal of controlling a quadcopter from the terminal). Speaking of Node, did you know that Node can talk to your serial ports? Tom Igoe wrote a post detailing how to do this over the summer, it’s very much worth checking out if you want your Arduino to talk to the internet.
I started reading Seymour Papert’s book Mindstorms and wanted to mess around with the LOGO programming language and found that Heroku has turned LOGO into a web app.
I’ve been nailing down the structure of the Thesis Progress site in the past few weeks and there are some rather exciting things I’ve got planned for it. More on that to come. And there’s a small demo app I made connecting Node.js to Processing.js via Socket.io, check it out.
We will be repeating this session this Thursday (Oct 11) 6-7:30PM Room 15.
Syntax we covered includes:
At office hours and workshops and help sessions we tend to mention a lot of websites for further reading and reference on all kinds of things. URLs are hard to remember and digging through a blog for the right URL is not an ideal use of time (cat videos are).
To that end, we’ve started a page on this blog, you can find a link to it above, the page is called LINKS. This link will take you to the page of links.
This week’s help session focused entirely on functions – What are they? How do we use them? And how can we write our own?
Here’s a link to all the CODE.
Thursday’s ICM Help Session | CODE
We went over objects, passing data into an object’s functions from the draw() loop and even functions that return data so that one object can communicate with another object.
We made this very avant-garde sketch of two balls where one ball stops and goes whenever the other ball bounces off the top or bottom.
