ITP Camp 2024

Welcome to the Un-University!

ITP Camp is a crash course and playground for creative and techy people who want to shake things up. Every June in New York City, we invite makers, artists, musicians, programmers, fabricators, and creatives of all sorts to join the ITP community to make stuff, hear speakers on the cutting edge, and collaborate with people from diverse disciplines.

Camp sessions, activities, and events run in the afternoons, evenings, and weekends throughout the month of June, NYC-time. Some people take the month off and immerse themselves fully in the culture and experience of ITP Camp, while others freelance or work part-time while attending sessions in between or remotely. Many participants maintain day jobs outside of ITP Camp and join us for the evening activities.

ITP was founded with the belief that making is as fundamental to thinking. Like any summer camp, ITP Camp is playful, cooperative and collaborative but with a serious purpose. We seek those who are motivated to drive changes through creativity. We open our doors to anyone who’s yearning to create, innovate, find meaning, or simple long for a creative outlet.

The creative charge of ITP Camp comes from the community of participants sharing ideas, skills, criticisms, and passions with each other in small, informal groups. We build a flexible structure, an Un-University, that’s responsive and supportive to the group we select. The structure is based on “unconferences" such as foocamp or barcamp, where presentations and discussions form in response to each participants’ interests and projects.

Here are some articles about what it's like to be at ITP Camp: Notes on Camp by Alanna Okun on Substack and Unbreakable Makers by Anthony Bui and Roland Arnoldt on NYU Connect

People

Campers are experienced, motivated and generous people. While ITP embraces hands-on learning, prior technical skills are not required. More than technical skills, we value the diversity of perspective and ideas that connects various fields of creatives together. At ITP Camp, you’ll have the opportunity to explore projects spanning a wide range of topics, including sociological experiments, art installations, new advertising models, health technologies, DIY biology, automatic window shades, cell phone games and live performances. ITP Camp is a non-credit program; it’s not designed for full-time students.

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Session Leaders can be pretty much anyone. Campers lead sessions. Invited experts lead sessions. ITP faculty lead sessions. Counselors lead sessions. The Un-University enables multidirectional learning - whether top-down, bottom-up, or side-to-side.

Counselors are your experienced guide and mentors. The Counselor HQ is a cross between Lucy’s Advice Booth and the Apple Genius Bar and is staffed by knowledgeable recent ITP graduates whose superpowers include electronics, programming, digital fabrication, mechanics, materials, and beyond. The Counselor HQ is your go-to place for troubleshooting and mentorship, available in-person and online to assist with your camp projects and growth.

Sessions

Session topics directly reflect participants’ interests of the camp. You can see the ideas for sessions starting to form on the schedule. Once you’ve registered, suggest sessions you'd like to see (for camp staff to organize, if possible) or schedule your own to lead.

ITP camp is intended for busy, working professionals, so you don’t have to come to every session – come to as many or as few as you like. You are asked to RSVP in advance for the sessions that you want to attend because sessions will be added or dropped based on enrollment.

Because of ITP Camp’s experimental structure, the content of camp varies every year. We don’t yet know what will be on the 2024 calendar, but here are some examples from the 200+ sessions that happened in 2023:

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Projects

Campers may develop fully functioning prototypes or generate new ideas to develop into longer-term projects. Your idea could be an extension from your work, for example, develop ideas to survive technological change for your media publishing company. You might already be in the thick of managing new technological possibilities for corporate clients, and want a summer camp to apply some of this new thinking to other projects of more artistic or social benefit. In all cases the project is owned by you, we only ask that openly share your work with fellow campers while participating. Past campers projects have included interactive installations, wearable technology, experimental art, and more.

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About ITP

ITP (Interactive Telecommunication Program) is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives. Perhaps the best way to describe us is as a Center for the Recently Possible. For over 30 years, ITP has been a hub of experimentation in art, media and technology.

ITP Camp is like putting the essence of ITP into the blender and puréeing into a month. It is ITP’s test kitchen, its R&D arm, its back of the napkin. It’s the place were we encourage you, our faculty, former students, colleagues, and community to experiment, challenge, and play.

ITP’s community will be made accessible to you through Camp activities. The creative atmosphere will help you generate ideas and implement projects and possibly broaden your own network and community of innovators and thinkers.

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