Creative Campus

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The fourth floor of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts building on Broadway looks like a scene from a slightly wacky summer camp for geniuses. At the offices and classrooms of the now retro-sounding Interactive Telecommunications Program, the atmosphere is one of pleasant chaos: Robots and other science and art projects are propped up everywhere. Students lounge at tables and on sofas, with their laptops open, but talking. The noise level is a low din. Even in the glassed-off “quiet room,” a young man can be seen standing before a group of seated friends, talking and gesturing dramatically.

ITP is a two-year master’s program that blends art, technology, and social justice. Similar to MIT’s Media Lab, ITP takes people from all backgrounds and inspires them to think creatively about how technology can improve people’s lives, whether through entertainment, through assistive technology for the disabled, or by opening up new art forms.

ITP has around 115 students in each class, and graduates go on to many different jobs. Many work at start-ups. Some join companies like Google or Apple. Others make careers as new-media artists. Unlike in a computer science program, the focus at ITP isn’t on the specific technology and tools, one faculty member, Daniel Shiffman, said. “Ultimately, it’s about the human connection — what technology can do for us.”

The chairwoman and a founder of the program, Red Burns, is a former filmmaker, who in the 1970’s campaigned for the creation of public-access television and experimented with two-way television to aid senior citizens. “We started this program in 1979, and our philosophy has never deviated,” she said. “It had to do with the fact that we were not about technology. We were about ideas.”

Ms. Burns said she prefers it when students come with no background in computer programming. “When people come in with some background, they think they know it,” she said. “We prefer them to come with a Zen mind.” She tries to convince students to “be open and be imaginative and above all to play.”

Students begin with foundation courses, including one on interactive technology, taught by Ms. Burns, and another on physical computing — a field that involves finding ways to interact with a computer beyond a keyboard and mouse. After that, they can take workshops on everything from composing music with algorithms to video game design.

One project to come out of the program recently is called “Dodgeball.” A social networking program that allows users to constantly update their friends via text message about their whereabouts in an evening, “Dodgeball” started as a thesis project and went on to be purchased by Google.

The projects on the floor the other day were wide-ranging. Just outside the elevator, “Wooden Mirror” — a contraption by an adjunct faculty member, Daniel Rozin, made of a video camera and a grid of small pieces of wood, which can turn up and down, reflecting different amounts of light — went into action to “reflect” a visitor’s image, making a stream of gentle clicking sounds as the pieces of wood went up and down.

In the lounge, two students, Mike Bukhin and Michael Delgaudio, were working on their project, “Way-Markr,” software that individuals can download onto their cell phones to take pictures at random moments throughout the day, creating a sort of photo diary. The results aren’t too interesting if you keep your phone in your pocket, of course, so Mr. Bukhin and Mr. Delgaudio have come up with creative ways for people to wear their cell phones — in pouches strapped across their chests, hung around their necks, or even lodged on the back of their baseball caps. Through the Technology and Social Justice program, run by faculty member Marianne Petit, which arranges internships at nonprofits, Mr. Bukhin and Mr. Delgaudio are teaching a group of girls at the Lower Eastside Girls Club to use “Way-Markr.” The girls particularly enjoy making and decorating the pouches, Mr. Bukhin and Mr. Delgaudio said.

The assistive technology lab — a collaboration between ITP and NYU’s occupational therapy program — develops prototypes to be placed at health facilities throughout the city. A resident researcher (basically, a junior professor) in the program, John Schimmel, demonstrated one project, called “Ramps,” which was inspired by the students seeing a group of young men expertly propel themselves in their wheelchairs through the halls of the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Medical Center, while simultaneously rapping at the nurses.

“We thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we could build a wheelchair deejay system?” Mr. Schimmel said. “The right wheel would fade, the left would scratch.” “Ramps” is, logically, afoldable pair of ramps, with microprocessors embedded in them. It didn’t work so well for deejaying ––the program would crash after about 10 minutes –– but it works great for playing video games via wheelchair.

Other projects to come out of the lab include “Smart Hug,” an inflatable vest for children with autism, which their teachers or parents can control to squeeze them at certain times. (Autistic children can often calm down if they are hugged tightly.) Another is “Reach,” a program to enhance physical therapy, in which a ball a child moves on the floor produces a corresponding moving image –– of a cartoon character, say ––on the ceiling. “One kid who would only do 20 minutes of therapy before did 50 minutes,” Mr. Schimmel said.

Ms. Burns and the other faculty encourage an atmosphere of collaboration and are always available to talk about students’ projects. The nonstop dialogue is the most rewarding aspect of teaching there, Mr. Shiffman said, but it can also make it a little hard to get work done, he admitted.

“It’s like one long giant office-hours session,” he said. He is currently writing a book –– an introduction to computer programming for artists –– and is a little worried about meeting his January deadline. “I think I’m going to have start going to Bobst Library a couple of hours a day,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to be at home just working on a book and programming software.”

Mr. Shiffman, who in his own work uses algorithms from nature to create interactive art, said he came to ITP after several unfocused years post-college. “I was a paralegal. I was a computer technician. I worked in theater. I went out to bars,” he recalled. “I wanted to go to graduate school, and I was thinking: ‘Maybe I want to go to a place like ITP, or maybe I want to go get a Ph.D. in philosophy.”

He’s very happy with the path he chose. “I don’t know if I knew this in advance, but [ITP] is the perfect place to have a lot of different interests and a lot of different skills ––or,” he laughed, “no skills at all — and come here and discover. That’s why it worked really well for me.”


The New York Sun

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