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!

Wikipedia-nerdy-ness here.

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

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, HERE ARE THE ANSWERS TO LAST WEEK’S CONTEST:

• My visa is expiring – MERCHE
• I watched Madonna – LIA
• I am addicted to Letterpress – GENEVIEVE
• I’m growing (trying to grow) a moustache – ANTONIUS
• I never put on pants the whole week NYU was closed – MIMI

And the winner is: Sara Al-Bassam, who got 3 out of 5 (Merche is not growing a moustache, btw)!!! You may claim your prize in the resident’s office! (We don’t know what it is yet)

Antonius

I disappointed Nancy by forgetting to wear a bowtie and top hat while emceeing our First Annual Thesis Showdown this past Saturday, December the 1st. But the students sure didn’t disappoint. Great job, everyone! The IAC is still not fully operational, but it’s always fun to go there and work with my team. I wrote this quick tutorial on how to make apps for the Windows 8 Store with Processing JS. I’d love some feedback — one MS fanboy already pointed out that MS uses different pointer and gesture events for Win 8 Apps and IE 10, so it needs some work. While doing research, I noticed KPCB released their latest 2012 trends presentation. Supposedly there are 6X more android users than iOS users, but check out this article on Android Engagement that questions those numbers. How come most mobile web traffic come from iOS users? What a mystery.

There’s a great article in the NY Times on how deaf students and scientists have taken the sign language lexicon into their own hands by disseminating signs of scientific terms over the internet, with the hope of standardizing them in a democratic way. And the interactive feature that comes with it is pure hypnotic bliss, thanks to Bloomberg’s ASL interpreter Lydia Callis.

I’ve helped a lot of people with illustrator and sewing this past month. Speaking of sewing, note to self: invest in Tweed and Tartan. Because the Chanel Métiers d’Art collection hands down wins the Pre-Fall 2013 season. Karl Lagerfeld, you can do no wrong. Even if you say Alexander Wang is the perfect replacement for Balenciaga’s outgoing creative director Nicolas Ghesquière. Not because he’s a good designer but because his parents are Asian and clothes are made in Asia. That’s just ridiculous. Everybody knows sweatshops exist in NYC too. Especially Alexander Wang. But on a more upbeat fashion note, check out these 1963 photos of Women in bubbles in Paris by Melvin Sokolsky for Harper’s Bazaar.

Oh, and how were your Thanksgivings? I spent mine in Louisville, Kentucky, with some good friends. And fortunate for me, Lou Nasti, whose studio the puppets class visited, had recently opened an animatronic show at the Galt House Hotel. Thanks to my handy dandy press pass, I got a VIP tour.

Craig

LA for Thanksgiving was warm and sunny! Since then it’s been office hours, office hours, and more office hours. It’s incredible how far everyone has come this semester. Looking forward to the Winter Show and seeing everyone’s projects in their finest form. Also, cant wait for the NIME show. Here’s one of my favorite NIME projects from last year, Jack Kalish’s “Sound Affects”.

Last Saturday’s “Thesis OMP-Gong Show” + “Nothing to Something Workshop” Day went really well. Much love to Antonius for MC’ing the show and Nick Yulman for his Automated-Gong, aka the Most Robust Stupid Pet Trick Project Ever Built.

My work at Vimeo is getting some internal traction, which I’m happy about. Current plan is to couple my project, a potential precursor to a Vimeo Labs, with the launch of their new API in the Spring.

Went to Carlin Wragg & Anna Pinkas’s Stroywalks App Launch Event Thursday night at the Eldridge Street Temple, great to see so many faces from ITP Class of 2012. Big congrats to the amazing team of Anna, Carlin, Chien, and our very own residents Lia and Merche, for their work on the project, it’s free in the App Store, check it out.

While we’re doing Class of 2012 shout outs, Bobby Genalo, launched PlaySomething.org last week with his project Commute, a piece he created while at ITP. And congrats to Toby Schachman for becoming an Eyebeam 2013 OpenArt Fellow. Meanwhile, Steve and I are considering building an Augmented Reality App for boxes of chocolate – “Never bite into the wrong piece again!” Yay? Nay?

And on the business front, entrepreneur Vibhu Norby wrote a thoughtful blogpost explaining his transition from a Mobile-First Philosophy to a Web-First one. VC Fred Wilson responded with a post tiled Rethinking Mobile First.

Eric

Thesis! Winter Show! End of the Semester! I spent a wonderfully quiet Thanksgiving break in Cleveland, but was happy to come back to the hecticness of both ITP and New York during the holidays. I was happy to help with the Thesis presentations (having the rather passive opportunity to just cue slides) and greatly enjoyed running through the brainstorming sessions. Overall I was quite impressed with both the range and depth of upcoming Thesis projects.
In addition to office hours, I’ve been back working hard on the Lasersaur troubleshooting, installing the chiller system, FIRING IT, and putting the optics system in place. Still a number of tests / questions to be answered about filtration and procedure, but early next semester I will be looking for interested parties to learn how the laser works.

Merche and I have also been assisting with a Window Construction class at FIT, helping students there with building interactive components for well crafted window holiday displays.

The Puppets and Performing object Class is having it’s final show this Wednesday evening at 9pm! Don’t miss it. Robots! Mice! Devils! Dragons! something for everyone. To get excited about puppets: watch NPH’s new puppet dreams and read about Guignol, the french puppet who inadvertently helped inspire modern shock and awe magic shows.

I’m also excited to hear about the advancement of 3d printers, with Staples operating them in Belgium & the Netherlands beginning next year. Also worth checking out the Pop-Up 3d printing shop.

My resident notes would be nothing without something kinetic, so here is an example of a mechanical singing bird box. GOOD LUCK Everyone with your final show preparations, whatever that show may be.

Genevieve

It’s strange to realize that the Winter show is upon us and the semester is almost over. The past few weeks have definitely flown by. I headed up to Boston for Thanksgiving, which was great, especially since I got to spend some quality time with my goddaughter. Back at ITP, the Thesis Saturday kickoff got me excited for all the projects the second years will be focusing on in the months to come.

I’ve been helping Midori and Nancy organize the WE Festival that will be happening the 22-23rd of January at ITP. Recent ITP Alum Lily Sjzanberg will be coming back to ITP to talk about developing her thesis project GAGE into a business. There are lots of other great speakers who will be there so apply if you’re interested in attending.

Mimi, Antonius and I have been helping Dan Shiffman and his students for their end of the semester Big Screens dress rehearsal (#mediumscreens), not to be confused with the actual Big Screens show at the IAC at a TBD date in 2013. We mounted 6 projectors in the lounge area, and are projecting onto some seamless paper, graciously procured by DanO. I’m pretty impressed how the class has made the best out of a less-than-ideal situation, and I’m looking forward to seeing where their projects are tonight.

Over at the IAC, this week I presented proposals for content I’ll be creating for the video wall once it’s back online. I got the go-ahead to move forward on some live video pieces so that’s nice. To achieve a high frame rate across all those pixels I’m getting my feet wet with shaders so the GPU can do the heavy lifting. I’m sitting in on Patrick Hebron’s Art of Graphics Programming class, and this week he went over a shader that computes Conway’s Game of Life. Another great shader resource I’ll be following as he develops it is Toby Schachman’s (ITP’12) interactive book about GPU programming. He just received an Eyebeam Open Art fellowship for the project so I’m excited to see it take shape!

Lia

Yesterday started with a happy surprise, as the iOS app I had been developing for weeks just got approved in the App Store. Just in time for the launch, too! I initially freaked out because it was listed under my birth name, Anna, and no one has called me that since my high school teachers and it just brought back scary memories. Anyway, the app is called Storywalks at Eldridge St, and its a site-specific app for the Eldridge St Synagogue. The project was started by ITP alums Anna Pinkas and Carlin Wragg as a class project for ITP. It eventually spawned a successful Kickstarter campaign.

The music was done by fellow resident Merche B. (see below) with audio engineering by Ryan Billia. It was awesome working with an all-girl tech team, too. A good number of our programming meetings were held in fancy bakeries surrounded by cupcakes and other frivolously decorated pastries. And there was giggling — a lot of giggling.

Storywalks was written in OpenFrameworks for iOS, with a small dose of Objective-C — mostly for accessing iphone-specific functionality. Chien and I are about to upload version 1.1, which will play nicer with iOS 6 and contains some minor bug fixes that didn’t make it to the first release.

Right before Thanksgiving, I worked with Jennings, Reed + Rader to shoot a whole-day event for Victoria’s Secret in Herald Square — basically shooting the fans with the super-hot VS Angels and then adding some digital angel wings. I did some fun stuff with OpenFrameworks, the Canon SDK, and ofxGreenScreen to automate the processing of the photos and make it ready for auto-uploading on the web. The shoot was fun if a little bizarre — pretty ladies, happy fans, lots of bras, lots of panties.

We hosted Thanksgiving in our home this year, which was an epic event involving lots of marathon cooking. I, being a nincompoop in the kitchen, was put in charge of the Tofurky.

Today I joined Midori and DanO for a group interview for new applicants. It was really interesting, if not surreal. It would have been hard for me to imagine as a nervous, quiet applicant, sitting in that room in 2009, what sort of weird adventures I would have in the years since I got accepted. I am grateful indeed.

If you are interested in learning openFrameworks, here’s a treat: Jeff Crouse has the code from a class he teaches at Parson’s up on Github. Lots of stuff there about particles and working with PVectors (some great translations of Dan’s Nature of Code stuff into OF) and other things like openCV, shaders, and playing with pixels. It’s a great repository. Jeff is also reworking a lot of his old tutorials, and already has one up about the mysterious pointer.

I also found this great add-on from James George that you can use to blend two or more projectors together. Awesome if you want to project on a large wall, a weirdly shaped space, or just have Big Screens envy.

Lastly, I love dumplings. I had dumplings last night for dinner, and I had them again for lunch today. If you go on this great Dumpling Tour this week (and I know its great because I’ve done it), proceeds go to folks still recovering from Sandy.

Merche

It was quite an interesting experience sharing a vegetarian sandwich and a beer as my Thanksgiving dinner, with a provisional and unorthodox family of aprox 200 members, who decided to take that same flight New york – L.A. that day…

Once there I was it was mind-blowing visiting the Museum of Jurassic Technology  and watching, among many other wonders, the work of Hagop Sandaldjian  and his micro miniatures. Three years ago I could enjoy Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder under the recommendation of Nancy Hechinger and since then I was waiting to visit that place… If you happen to be in LA this is a must!

It was my first time also swimming in the Pacific and swimming during the last days of November! And I had to hang upside down in different structures next to the sea for a videoclip I was working on with some band in Barcelona.

As Miss. Martinez also mentioned the App we have been working on is now in the App Store just in time for the launch party last Thursday…thank you so much to the ones that came!!! (or were there in spirit with us) . We had some special appearances..

On Wednesday I could listen to music through my teeth a very simple, yet very effective experiment by Aisen Caro, who was presenting in Dorkbot where, by they way, I could also enjoy the presentation of our talented Sean Sean McIntyre explaining the project “Double One Design: Autonomous Interactive Radio” .

In ITP there have been a lot of finals-helping sessions and arrangements for the NIME show happening tomorrow….I know these are busy days for students, but you should take a break to see that!

Thesis day I was unfortunately just half there containing a flu that made me crash after that for some days, so I hope I made some sense during the workshop session!! Second years made a great work presenting their proposals and it is going to be quite an experience witnessing how they evolve in the future months..

Finally a recommendation of a show: ANN HAMILTON: the event of a thread in Park Avenue Armory.

Mimi

Office hours exploded in the last 2 weeks with everyone finishing up their finals. It’s been really great to watch everyone’s projects grow and evolve.

Thesis Day was a blast, but seriously exhausting! It was pretty awesome to absorb over 100 project proposals in just a couple of hours and the brainstorming session was animated and felt too short rather than too long.

We had a little too much fun making the credits for Medium Screens 2012 such that now we’re going to have to redesign a whole different set of credits for Big Screens 2013, but all for a good cause! Dan has a special talent for settings low expectations. Yet, Medium Screens came off amazingly smoothly given the amount of real prep time everyone’s had. But I must say the glue that held the evening together was the Antonius soundtrack.

Yesterday I managed to finally get out to see Louis Kahn’s FDR memorial on Roosevelt Island. http://www.fdrfourfreedomspark.org/

Anyhow, the pictures on the website don’t do it justice. It’s a poem written in texture and perspective, in what you see and what’s obscured, what’s open, what’s framed and what you need to seek out.

One incredibly detail is at the head of the monument which is shaped like a ship (echoing the shape of Roosevelt Island itself) there are large ponderous pillars to your right and left, standing shoulder to shoulder completely obscuring your view of the Manhattan and Queens skylines. The obvious effect of these pillars directs your attention forward to look south toward the Williamsburg Bridge and NY Harbor beyond. However, the pillars themselves are spaced approximately one-inch apart and the surface of the stone along the inside of the gap (which run 6 feet deep) is polished to a mirror-like state. As you approach it, you see a sliver of the Manhattan skyline through the gap and then you see it again reflected off the inner surface of the stone. The effect is all the more thrilling because all of the exterior surfaces of stone have been ground to a fine, matte texture that’s more white than gray, more powdery than smooth.

It was a perfectly cloudy, foggy day to visit, but I imagine the site is poignant in a different way in every kind of weather and largely undiscovered by tourists. Plus the elevated tram ride from 59th and 2nd over the East River is something fun to do all on its own.

Can’t wait for NIME tonight!

Nick

Being home in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving was pretty wonderful — my nephew Ezra was born on Thanksgiving night!  We packed a Thanksgiving picnic basket for my sister Kait and brother in-law Geoff and brought it to the hospital.  In other family news, my mom was on Jeopardy this week!  Apparently she wears the same color eyebrow makeup as Alex Trebek.  For practice, my dad programmed a Jeopardy game that pulls questions from an online database and uses a hacked usb numpad and pvc pipe for custom made buzzers.  While I was in town, I also checked-out Dancing Around the Bride at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  It’s a beautifully designed exhibit with live dance performances happening in the main gallery — highly recommended for Duchamp, Cage & Cunningham fans.

It has been a very busy couple of weeks helping people with P-Comp and ICM finals. I’ve seen a lot of interesting projects coming together and am looking forward to the Winter Show. Tuesday night we had a dress rehearsal for the NIME show and now I’m even more excited for Sunday’s show at Glasslands.  A number of jaw dropping moments – prepare to be dazzled.

Thesis Saturday was great – I really enjoyed hearing about what everyone is thinking about doing and helping with brainstorming.  I hope the mechanical gong timer I rigged up for the presentations didn’t traumatize anyone too mu -GOOOONG!!!!!!!!-.

Steve

I went back to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving and was digging through my old electronics and found my TI-83+ and a usb cable for it. I was feeling real smug about the unit conversion programs I wrote for it until I saw that someone has recreated Portal on the TI-83.

Thesis Saturday was great. I really enjoyed seeing what all the second years have been up to and what they are planning on working on next semester. All in the space of a little over 100 minutes. The application form I made seems to have worked pretty well for everyone (or you didn’t complain loud enough). For the rest of December and early part of January I’ll be working extra hard on completing the platform all you second years will be using for Thesis class.

Max Ogden finally figured out how to connect an Arduino to a Parrot AR.Drone 2.0: https://gist.github.com/4152815. At some point when I have some time I’m going to test this out. Which reminds me, I’m very excited to see what happens during next semester’s classes, the list looks real awesome. Speaking of next semester’s classes, James George just launched a kickstarter for an interactive documentary “exploring creativity through the lens of coding,” the project is called Clouds.

A friend of mine showed me this image of Chicago from the sky, from the west, the tree cover in that city is rather remarkable. I’ve always wanted to compare the average building height from Chicago to the average building height in New York City…if I could just find the dataset.

My good friend Joe Kloc wrote an article for the Paris Review about people who live on the streets, seemingly by choice, the article was also partially a review of the book Subways Are For Sleeping. I’m in my third year in New York City, during the first two the city was mainly just a medium I had to travel through between my apartment and school. This year I’ve been trying to pay attention more to the rest of the city.

This article was all over the blogs but I’ll put it here in case you missed it. Craig Mod writes a lot about publishing and its future on the internet. This article compares the publishing industry now to the car industry right before the oil crisis of the 70s.

Finally, if you’ve got some time to listen to a 40 minute video about programming languages check out this talk that Jeremy Ashkenas (creator of CoffeeScript and Backbone.js) gave comparing code to literature.

http://www.koalastothemax.com/

Antonius

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.

Craig

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!

Eric

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!

Lia

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.)

Nick

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.

Steve

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/

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 &amp; 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:

• M. Wells, a beautiful dream of a restaurant that had to close its doors last year, is back! They’re now serving their wildly adventurous food at PS1. I got to sample the new offerings and will be going back frequently. RIYL: food as art, weird meat.
• Speaking of things that make me salivate, the FORM 1 3D printer looks like it will be awesome. The first desktop model that uses stereolithography instead of extrusion.
• One of my favorite musicians, Tom Ze, has a new(ish) album. Here’s a brief video intro to his work including footage of his “sampler” from the 70s using tape machines and power tools.
• And for those who like their music raw and mathematical, this site is endlessly entertaining. here’s a jam that I made.

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]

• Scientists have discovered similarities in the way ants look for food and how TCP works.
• Clay Shirky’s TED talk about how Git & Github will hopefully transform how governments work. Seeing how Git is getting used in non-programming ways is fascinating.
• Flocking in Processing.js with Coffeescript. This blog post was based on Dan Shiffman’s flocking example in Processing which the writer has ported to Coffeescript and Processing.js. It’s a great read to get everyone excited about Nature of Code next semester (and for the book to be released soon!).
• My friend Drew has an excellent blog about cities, the internet, and how the two intersect. In this post Drew talks about how much of what happens behind the scenes on the internet is technologically amazing and complex but to most users is just clicking a button. Drew’s a much better writer than I am, read that post.
• Woah. This just blew my mind: Styler. If you’ve ever changed some CSS in the web inspector and been irked that you have to repeat the changes in your CSS files, this is for you. Styler is a CSS editor that instantly changes the page to reflect your new style rules and also puts those same changes in your local CSS files.

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: