Residents’ Digest #9

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Craig

Antonius

A special shout out to my hometown, Boston. My thoughts go out to those who were directly affected by the recent acts of terror during the Boston Marathon. I’m very grateful my family, friends and old colleagues are safe.

On a more positive note, I got accepted to present two projects at the 13th International NIME Conference in South Korea. I can’t wait to go, but I really need to brush up on my Korean. All I know is Sarang Hae, Gguh jyuh and random things I picked up from K-Pop. Fighting!

While I’m on that side of the world, I plan to visit Toshitaka Amaoka at his lab in Tokyo and recite haikus while riding the bullet trains of Japan. This is one of my favorites:

古池 / 蛙飛び込む / 水の音
furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto
The old pond / A frog jumps in, / Kerplunk!
- 松尾芭蕉 (Matsuo Bashō), 1686. Translation by Allen Ginsberg

Please send me more haikus, especially ones you wrote yourself.

Craig

Big news to report, I leveled up a generation and became an uncle a few weeks ago! Vimeo work is progressing, but taking a bit longer than anticipated. Got notes back from designers on the app I’m building, working on addressing them before we push anything out. There’s also an internal API hack day happening this Saturday, the 4th, excited to see what comes out of it.

Most of my time at ITP lately has been spent in office hours. I was able to sit in on the PitchFest, which was really great. So impressed with everyone that presented, and big congrats to Doug Kanter and the whole Databetes team for making it to the finals of the Stern Business Plan Competition. I also went to the Rhizome 7 on 7 event last Saturday, which was a blast. It reminded me of a rapid fire version ITP Applications class. The presentations will hopefully be online HERE soon, including Evgeny Morozov’s keynote.

Some other noteworthy items:

Bruce Sterling: Fantasy Prototypes and Real Disruption

Brett VIctor: Stop Drawing Dead Fish

KhanAcademy: A Conversation with Elon Musk

Google Street View Hyperlapse

Churnalism: Sunlight Foundation

Let’s Free Congress: an SVA Master’s Thesis

NY Times: 4:09:43 – 19 stories from the Boston Marathon Finish Line

Eric

It’s been a busy few weeks of office hours, assorted projects, and I’m not really sure what else because all of a sudden it’s the last weeks of the semester. I took a short Chicago trip and saw the Green Mill, an awesome Jazz bar from the Al Capone era. highly recommend it if you find yourself in Chicago.

I’ve also been bitten by the web-programming bug in the past week, and am burning my way through Code Academy Lessons, Mozilla CSS animations, and this beautiful illustrator plugin Drawscri.pt (Thanks Lia!).

Thesis week is upon us. See as many presentations as you can, between the large screens on the floor, the room itself, and the online streaming with an always interesting live commentary from current students, ITP Alum, and Faculty.

For your viewing pleasure:

3d printed sonogram

Beautifully rendered Fluid dynamics

How many connections can a Lego Brick take?

Toh Kay beautiful animated music video (beware, it’s a large file)

Genevieve

It’s crazy to think that the semester is winding down, and that thesis week is almost upon us! It’s been great to see how far the projects have come and what else will happen in the final stretch. I’m looking forward to tuning into the presentations, and hanging out with Tom and other alumni on the thesis shep channel.

I had the opportunity to see Kevin Slavin in conversation with Thomas Bayrle last week at the Goethe Institute. I had no idea Kevin apprenticed for Thomas back when he was an art student at Cooper Union. He spoke a lot about the algorithmic qualities inherent in Bayrle’s work, which he began doing long before computer processes could automate them. We also had a moment of silence in light of the decision by Cooper Union’s board of trustees to begin charging tuition for the first time in the school’s history. This blog post puts the tragic decision in context, and has harsh words for the “global education brand” that universities like NYU are pursuing.

I saw James Nares’s amazing video piece Street at the Met. It ends May 27th and I highly recommend checking it out. This article has a good description of his process. I was also able to check out Jon Kessler’s most recent installation at the Swiss Institute, called The Web. It’s down now unfortunately but was pretty epic. Also, if you get a chance before Sunday, I highly recommend checking out Shane Hope’s show at Winkleman Gallery. It’s pretty wonderful, and a great use of 3d printing. And mark your calendars boys and girls, James Turrell is coming to the Guggenheim in June!

Lia

Hey first years — thesis week is coming up in a few weeks! In case the last digest doesn’t come out before then, the best advice I can give you is to make time to watch some presentations. In fact, watch as many as you can. Sit close to the front and show your support. It’s the best week of the year and the culmination of our beloved second years’ ITP careers (kind of). Regardless, the presentations will be amazing (at least from what I’ve seen).

Now that my wrist is finally out of the brace, I started using the Leap to measure my progress with regards to range of motion and track it on a personal website that my doctor will have access to. I suspect that he has his doubts about the accuracy of the measurement but is pleased with my zeal.

Working on the development side of some interactive Processingjs maps for Canada’s Tar Sands Solutions Network. Launching soon.

Lots of interesting meetings, including one with the awesome ITP alum JP de Pedro of Toca Boca. If you haven’t seen them yet, Toca Hair Salon and Toca Band are the best apps out there today.

Went to Seattle/ Portland over the weekend. I visited the EMP Museum for the Science Fiction exhibit where I met one of the best characters in cinema history, Teddy from AI. The website has a great reading list of SF novels that I’d love to dive into.

Speaking of SF: Sci-Fi Interfaces.

A Quality site: hot men and cats.

Silly-fast Mobile Prototoyping

Collaborative Coding

Mimi

I attended a funeral last weekend in New Jersey for a distant family member and was re-reminded of the social/economic/cultural bubble that is lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

I decided to screw it and have started helping students with OF and various back-end web frameworks I have no experience with. I have yet to violate the hippocratic oath (I think) and it’s been a fun learning experience for me. Really in fact most of the questions have little to do with what is peculiar to these technologies…

It’s also been really gratifying to see everyone’s thesis projects come together, some with surprise endings! I’m also excited for the Big Screens teams next year, which I’ve always thought of as the thesis project you do before thesis or (during thesis, as the case may be).

While we’re still on the topic of thesis and more specifically thesis presentations, I found this opinion piece that does a good job of explaining scientific method (what it is and what it isn’t) in terms that impact daily existence, at least for those of us who lap up media reports about scientific research results.

On the Parlor front, we’ve finally started to engage with some K12 folks. As it turns out, this whole free-range social reading thing aligns pretty well with the new Common Core English standards. We’re also getting interest from Yale and other liberal artsy northeast schools who are trying to figure out how humanities can participate in this new world of technology-enabled learning given that most of the technologies are optimized for STEM.

I had a nice conversation with Tom about use of technology in dance and ways to capture, visualize and amplify “movement data” in dance which brought me back to this Steve-Reich-driven Anna Teresa de Keerksmaeker piece. Low tech and very satisfying.

Merche

The last weeks brought me something to decorate my bathroom! I won the “People’s choice to the Most Unusual Instrument” prize and the third prize of the Jury in Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.

I really enjoyed the time there and I met eighteen amazing artists from all around the world showing their inventions. Somehow it felt a little sad that I was the only girl participating on this, and that is something I have been witnessing in all NIME related events I have attended….so this is is a call to all you girls NIME-inventors!! (considering the amount of people that I think is reading these lines, will be a very quiet call…)

And I wanted to share some of the jewels that I met there:

Hans Leeuw and his Electrumpet (1st Prize)

Onyx Ashanti and his Beatjazz Exo-Voice Prothesis (2nd Prize)

Bruce Gremo and his cilia

And I am sure we will all hear about this really soon since they are launching it worldwide in the next months:

Roli’s Seaboard: New Synth / Electric Piano

Pretty awesome device!!

And this coming weekend I will be participating in the event “Twilight of the Sound Object” organized by the NYU Department of Music and First Performance with very interesting workshops, sessions and keynotes…totally recommend it and planning to spend all Saturday there.

Inside ITP walls world I have been witnessing how some of the projects in my Thesis group come alive in different venues in NY and I am sooooooo proud of them! They have all worked extremely hard and it’s great to see them flourish in their final shape. I back Lia’s message to first years: Don’t miss Thesis presentations!!

Also I recently got a “present” from the past, and I am diving in all sorts of video formats to digitalize and upload the archive of previous NIME performances since 2002…will share the link when I am done!

And I leave with a song that has been banging my head for the last weeks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7lBJPMun2A

Nick

Great to see all the thesis projects coming together. I second Lia’s advice to first years: nothing will prepare you better or make more excited for your own thesis than watching, discussing and celebrating the presentations during thesis week. I enjoyed seeing Owen Roberts and Mark Kleeback perform their thesis projects at Secret Project Robot this past weekend (as well as a reprise of Danne Woo’s great NIME project).

I’ve been working furiously to finish up music I’m creating for an Animated StoryCorps TV special that will air on PBS later this year. I’ve always wanted to write music for cartoons

I’ve also been prepping for a show in Paris opening in June at the Palais de Tokyo — a giant walk through music box installation. My friend Ranjit who I’ll be working on it with has a cool looking show opening this week at the Clocktower Gallery.

Steve

My office hours have been completely full the last few weeks. Which is awesome. I don’t seem to get to see what students are working on unless they sign up for office hours and there are definitely some great projects happening right now. I wish I had taken Redial as a student.

Working with Adam Quinn this week we were able to export the thesis summaries from the thesis site into an InDesign template without having to copy and paste all of the information in. I get a bit too excited when I see programs support scripting. Speaking of which, if you haven’t seen it already, [DrawScript], a plugin for Adobe Illustrator was released recently that lets you convert Illustrator shapes into code, in Processing!

I’ve begun working with Rune Madsen and O’Reilly doing similar work as last summer with Dan Shiffman on the Magic Book Project.

Oh, and I just duplicated most of the Residents’ site with Github Pages: http://itpresidents.github.io which is a great reason to mention this link : http://developmentseed.org/blog/2013/05/01/introducing-jekyll-hook/

Residents’ Digest #8

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Craig

Required Reading: An Interview With Computing Pioneer Alan Kay

Antonius

I started weaving conductive threads into fabric with a loom and hacking a lazy susan to count the number of rotations using a hall effect sensor and rare earth magnets. Both are prototypes for a larger project. I have been sending applications to grants and residencies in hopes I can continue to work on them. Meanwhile, I’ve been collecting performances of modern music using traditional instruments and would really like to share them with you. Let me know if you know of any more!

Voodoo Chile by Jimi Hendrix performed on a gayageum.

Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, Japanese Noh style.

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen performed by an angklung orchestra.

Transmission by Joy Division performed with steel drums.

Not Great Men by Gang of Four covered by a Javanese Gamelan Orchestra.

Craig

Been super busy cranking on my work for the Vimeo internship. One of the apps is close to going live, which is exciting. I’ll share it with everyone once it’s up. Managed to catch “The Visitors” video installation with Genevieve and Antonius a couple weeks ago. It was inspiring, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Had a great time running workshops for Comm Lab Web and its exciting to see the thesis progress everyone is making.

Over the next couple weeks, I’m planning on doing some much overdo documentation of Shiffman’s office/studio. Also will be going to the Rhizome Seven On Seven talks on Sat April 20th. Let me know if you’re going!

And here are some notable items I’ve enjoyed recently-ish on the internetz:

For those following the development of Aereo, they just won another court battle. The fight is heating up!

The New Yorker launched a Science & Tech Blog.

Peanut Gallery Films – A Chrome Experiment

Recalling1993 – Call 1-855-FOR-1993

Icons Times

Grantland – Cameras & Computer Vision in the NBA

AVC – Why We Spend So Much Time On Policy

Guide to Configuring Your Mac for an Installation

Future of FireFox Dev Tools

Eric

Poof, and down goes the month of March, though winter certainly held on for long enough. Early on in the month I finished a short term art installation Time Machine for Playtime New York. Following that, Thesis midterm presentations, office hours, a snowy Cleveland spring break and plenty of NCAA basketball games.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with rubber mold making (both laser cut and 3d printed parts), and casting refined sugar mechanical parts. This video shows how refined sugar is actually produced, something which I am attempting to mimic.

I’ve also been stalking the Oculus Rift blog, waiting for any Mac support before buying a one, but they certainly peaked my interest between Unreal/Unity dev kit and full Team Fortress 2 support.

So You Want to Make A Website Workshop

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Steve

Link to Web Resources page

Which Mobile Framework Works For Your Thesis?

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Lia

Intro to the Cutting Machine

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Antonius

Details about the Graphtec Craft Robo Pro small cutting machine

Materials:
- less than .25 mm thickness
- slightly thicker materials can be cut with multiple passes.
Compatible materials:
- vinyl, paper and paperboard.
The max cutting range is 375 mm (width) x 50 m (length).
Have your designs ready as an illustrator compatible vector graphic – no raster images.

Software:
Cutting Master 2
Illustrator Plugin

Materials:
- Cutting Mat
- Clear Contact Paper

Intro to OF

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Lia

Hi all,
Here is the example we looked at with a vector of bouncing ball objects.
To try it out, download and unzip the repo. Then, move the “ball_bounce_demo” folder into your Openframeworks “myApps” folder and open the xcode project file( ball_bounce_demo.xcodeproj).

Here’s the presentation that we used to guide us through the workshop.
If you need more help, please don’t hesitate to come for office hours with Lia, Genevieve, Nick or Merche!

———–
addendum (Lia):
There was a question about when to use or not use the “new” operator when creating new objects in C++. I didn’t answer it very well (and probably still won’t), but it has to do with memory management. In Processing, we make a new object like so, where we always use the “new” operator:

myClass x = new myClass();

in C++, there are two ways to make a new class, and which way you choose depends on if you want to allocate memory from the heap or the stack.

// on the stack myClass x;

// or on the heap ... see the pointer?? myClass *x = new myClass;

If you’re using the stack (no pointer), you access member variables and functions like so:

x.myVariable;

if you’re using the heap (pointer), you would use this:
x->myVariable;

We don’t want to get too much into it at this point, but if you want to read more about Heaps and Stacks, try this link. . Here is Jeff Crouse’s tutorial on C++ constructors. tldr: unless your object is large, or you need to use it beyond local scope, use the stack (no pointers) way.

Getting started with Processing.js

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Steve

Here are some links from Nature of Code today about using Processing.js to write directly with Javascript:

complete example of an html page using processing.js

The same as above but in JSFiddle

Other Libraries

http://haptic-data.com/toxiclibsjs/
http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/
http://paperjs.org/

Tutorials and Syllabuses for learning Javascript

https://github.com/Hebali/AoGP_Fall_2012
http://pixelshaders.com/sample/
http://creativejs.com/tutorials/
http://stewd.io/javascript/

Illustrator Workshop 2

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Antonius

Residents’ Digest #5

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Craig

Craig

Happy to be getting back into the swing of things post-Sandy. I’ve been super impressed with the Occupy Movement’s ability to organize and disseminate information throughout the disaster. Also, ITP Alum 2012 Becky Kazansky wrote a great piece on Mesh Networks in Red Hook which included a well-deserved mention of current ITP student Sean McIntyre who’s been directly involved with ITDRC.

Been hearing a ton of great ideas for final projects, looking forward to seeing them come to life in the next few weeks. Had another meeting with Dan Shiffman and Shawn Van Avery regarding our online education efforts. We’ve got some exciting stuff in the works, hoping to be implemented in The Nature of Code class next semester. Also, congrats to Dan Shiffman for releasing his Nature of Code book. If you’re looking for something to do over Winter Break, read this book!

The Vimeo internship is picking up momentum, been digging into the Vimeo Advanced API, which is pretty well designed. If anyone is interested in messing around with it, let me know, happy to get you rolling.

Here’s another amazing Chrome Experiement: Explore the Galaxy. And just when you thought you’d had enough of Psy, check out Infinite Gangham Style along with a brief explanation of what’s actually going on here.

Eric

Office hour questions have gotten bigger literally (building structures to hang off of) and figuratively (building complex gyroscopic motor systems). I have also spent a fair amount of time helping with a few classes. For all of you who missed the PAPO performance, you are in luck! Keep your eyes open for the impending final show (at a yet to be determined time). Patricia’s Ideas taking shape class produced their own laptop stands, which I helped to cut out using our CNC routing machine. The Lasersaur has been giving me endless grief since I am at the part in the project where one step forwards seems like two steps backwards. Pushing through that, I’m still excited to be able to fire the laser in the next few weeks.

Get ready for Thesis Second Years! Thesis is now! (also December 1st).

3d scanned and printed objects to blend in with everyday things

A PHD Thesis paper doing gait analysis on Theo Jensen’s Strandbeasts, and trying to figure out another more efficient system

The Marmalade Group – combining technology and old school model making to create absolutely beautiful slow motion shots

Genevieve, Lia, Antonius, Merche and Mimi (GLAMM)

In the spirit of collaboration, we are making a group digest update today. One of us finished the music for a certain iPad app about a Synagogue and the other one is finishing up the development and getting the same app ready for the app store! Also, one of us is building Windows 8 and Windows RT apps via Processing JS. One of us is in San Francisco, again! shooting user interviews. One of us is part of an amazing CSF (Community Supported Fishery) in Brooklyn, and last week made this delicious chilli crab dip with our weekly haul. Too bad there was no fish food at the election night party, but it was cool cuz Obama won! What does Obama have to do with fish food? One of us climbed to the top of the Christopher Columbus statue on 59th street to hang out in the living room built around it. The piece is called Discovering Colombus by Tatzu Nishi, and you should really go see it before the exhibit closes. One of us really like puppies. One of us does not. Here are some dog houses. Speaking of houses one of us just got a new one with Valentina, guess who? Did you check out ITP Alumni Valentina and Maria’s voting app, by the way? Esta Amazinga. One of us went to a Madonna concert, and it’s not who you think it is.

At this moment, we are all watching the Big Screens midterms and all the projects are looking pretty snazzy. The class has a great dynamic, thinking through what the audience will see and staying calm despite the time constraints. Speaking of constraints, one of our visas is expiring. Can you guess whose? Also, one of us is growing a moustache. Can you guess which? NIME is going to be kickass. The invites are being printed right now. We all met with Nancy to discuss the incoming thesis sessions. Who thinks this is exciting? We all do!

****** GAME ********

SEND IN YOUR ANSWERS!

WINNERS GET A SPECIAL PRIZE!!!

Instructions: Connect the resident to what they did this week

Antonius
Genevieve
Lia
Merche
Mimi

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

Nick

Great to see people’s midterms and to hear the first rumblings of ideas for finals. If you’re working on a project involving automated movement, I’ll be doing a special pcomp help session on solenoids next monday at 8pm in the conference room. We’ll review different types of solenoids, look at how to control them with the Arduino and talk about strategies for designing mechanisms around them.

I saw a brilliant piece at BAM last week called “Sans Object” by the French performance group Compagnie 111. It featured two performers interacting with a large industrial robot arm and a very cleverly designed set in a number beautifully choreographed, often dangerous looking, sequences. It made me want an industrial robot.

I’m planning to attend The Status of Sound, a fantastic looking conference on defining the history of sound art coming up at the CUNY Grad Center on Fri Nov. 30th.

My friends at StoryCorps just finished a new animated short based on one of my favorite clips.

Steve

It was great to get back to ITP after the hurricane. The questions at office hours are getting harder and more interesting. Regexes to socket connections to deciphering Processing libraries and Ruby & Javascript questions also.

Rune and I went to the Visualized Conference last week at the New York Times building. I saw and talked to a handful of ITP students, both current and alums. My two favorite talks were from Alexander Chen (creator of mta.me, baroque.me and the Les Paul Google Doodle), Shan Carter who made 512 Paths to the White House. And of course ITP’s own Matt Epler added a 5 minute bit of levity talking about his tangible data viz project from last spring. Unfortunately I missed Jake Porway’s talk.

A few people have asked me throughout the semester how to make a website using Jekyll, and I’ve replied with “I’ll tell you later,” now I’ve found what looks like a great and extensive tutorial on using Jekyll, check it out. And even though I’ve decided to stop using CoffeeScript, here’s an excellent talk about programming languages by Jeremy Ashkenas.

Rounding out the links, the history of the planet in 1 minute (by the creator of my second favorite video ever). My new favorite radio show is WFMU’s Downtown Soulville.

Illustrator Basics Again

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Antonius

Just a friendly link to the Illustrator presentation

The Residents Blog

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Residents’ Digest #9

Residents’ Digest #8

So You Want to Make A Website Workshop

Which Mobile Framework Works For Your Thesis?

Intro to the Cutting Machine

Intro to OF

Getting started with Processing.js

Illustrator Workshop 2

Residents’ Digest #5

Illustrator Basics Again