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Inspiration, Innovation & Interactivity

The ITP Winter Show 2003

By Kate Monahan

[Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]

Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2004, NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) is dedicated to “the study and design of new media, computational media, and embedded computing under the umbrella of interactivity”.1 At the end of each semester, this pioneering graduate program hosts an impressive public exhibition of its students’ recent work. The ITP Winter Show 2003, held on December 16th and 17th, featured more than 80 student projects and attracted a crowd of more than a thousand.

Figure 1.

The event was a bustling playground of sounds, images, movement, and people that filled almost an entire floor of the ITP facilities at 721 Broadway. The projects showcased the students’ skills in virtual space and 3D design, physical computing, interaction design, video and audio installations, visual art, and much more. The works were created—some individually, some collaboratively—by students in 13 different ITP courses with such evocative titles as “The Poetics of Virtual Space,” “Kinetic Structures & Eco-Design,” and “Mediated Urban Spaces.”

Each project, though distinctly unique, employed some combination of technology and art to investigate what happens when viewers can affect and be affected by the work they’re viewing. Beautiful, provocative, inspirational, entertaining, political, or practical, each project was continually surrounded by crowds of fascinated attendees awaiting their turn to—quite literally—get their hands on it. Though it would be impossible to do justice to all of the projects here, a representative sampling is described below.

“Truly Interactive TV,” described by its creator James Robinson as “a chat client for frustrated screenwriters,” invites participants to repurpose quotes from television shows into meaningful conversation. Choosing from tens of thousands of actual TV lines stored in a database, two participants create an often amusing exchange on the screen in front of them (figure 1). As one person’s choice is displayed, the other person uses a controller to select a response either from the entire database or from a small collection of responses suggested by the software.

Figure 2.

“23 Cent Stories,” by Lian Chang, Michael Sharon, and Manlio Lo Conte, uses the tradition of postcards to experiment with interactive narrative. Using an impressive web-based interface (http://www.23centstories.com), a person can select a virtual New York City postcard, write a brief story or message, and save it to an online database. From the website (or from a selection of actual postcards affixed with bar codes that were available at the show), the person can also retrieve existing messages written by others for a given postcard.

Joon Seo Lee created “Inter-whactive TV” as “a digital homage to the analog.” This fun installation presents the audience with an old rabbit-eared television that displays nothing but static (figure 2). Following their instincts (if they’ve ever owned such a television) and the instructions placed next to the piece, participants bang on the television and twist the antennae to make it work. The reward? A series of crystal-clear video images.

“WeBe” is a practical web application that empowers individuals to collaborate in group purchases. The goal of the creators, Brandon Brown, Olivier Massot, Yoonjung Kim, and Megan Phalines, is to facilitate the coordination of groups of diverse, physically distant people “so that they can benefit from both the purchasing power of a group and from the social effects of forming group ties.”

Jungeun Yoo’s addictive “Silhouette Play” uses an IR sensor, a webcam, and Jitter software to create a soundscape and display a participant’s silhouette surrounded by multiple colorful outlines on a large screen (figure 3). As they move or interact with their silhouette, the sound and the number and color of the outlines change based on the participant’s distance from the screen.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

“Belonging,” an interactive documentary about women who move to New York City on their own from another country, allows participants to choose from among six interviews with such women, and to access additional information about them. The work focuses on the women’s positive and negative experiences of being alone in a foreign country, what they miss about their home country, and what special objects they brought with them. The creators, Idit Kobrin, Maria Michaelides, Pei-Chen Chen, and Catherine Boelhauf, chose the title “Belonging” based on their shared experience that “a person can belong somewhere, but also can be longing for a particular place.”

Daniel Hirschmann’s pleasing creation, “Sculpticles,” consists of a grid of luminescent orbs on metal stalks that change color as people move them up or down. “Born out of a frustration with the passive experience of viewing artwork on a monitor,” Hirschmann’s goal is to allow people the opportunity to change the work they are viewing through their interaction with it (figure 4).

A powerful video installation by Geraldine Chung and Vivian Wenli Lin, “Holler!” exposes participants to the harassment from men (whistles, stares, comments) that many young women have experienced in public spaces. In the installation’s enclosed room, a sensor detects a participant as he or she enters and sends data to a computer that triggers a projection of various men “hollering” onto the wall in front of the participant. If the participant “confronts” the images by walking closer, the system replaces the projection with videotaped interviews of women who are regularly confronted with this type of unwelcome attention.

Figure 5.

“Spider Plant,” by Ian Curry, is a hybrid organic/digital system consisting of a living plant that obtains water through prosthetic “roots” made up of a software spider that searches the Internet for the word “water”. When the Java spider encounters the word, actual water is released to the plant and the context of the word’s usage on the Internet is displayed on an accompanying screen (figure 5). Curry was inspired by the idea that “the Internet has the same kind of fluidity as an ocean—with tides of usage, currents, chasms and beaches.”

“Side-by-Side—Relational Musical Chairs,” by Rikayo Horimizu, invites the passerby to sit in one of several grouped rocking chairs. A sensor (accelerometer) embedded in each chair is linked to a computer music program (MAX/MSP) that generates a pleasant, ambient sound as the participant sitting in the chair rocks back and forth. The project aims to connect strangers in public “waiting” spaces such as subway stations or airport lounges by providing the collective experience of composing music together.

“Pixiebox,” by John Geraci, merges the live video images of two participants into a fluid and evolving “organic whole” on an LCD screen that hangs suspended between them (figure 6). The project is an exploration of Geraci’s notion that “real sharing is more than simple trade—it involves combining our resources with others, with the anticipation that the result will be better than the original parts.”

Conceptualized as “a metaphor for the world as seen through public web cameras,” “Earthsee,” by Yoonhee Moon and Liubomir Borissov, is an interactive map of the world composed of “pixels” of continually updated webcam images from each region (figure 7). The viewer uses two movable light sources on a clear table in front of the map to navigate or to zoom in on a specific image in the dazzling array of options. More information is available at {http://earthsee.dadastream.com}.

Figure 6.

Figure 7.

“Catalyst,” by Diego Bauducco, Michael Sharon, Ron Goldin, and Andrea Roscoe, is a collaborative software program for artists and designers working on multimedia projects. “It provides a centralized environment for storing and sharing resources, giving feedback, and visualizing the development of a project in a number of different ways.” As an example, the creators describe a scenario in which an artist working on a logo design could upload a rough version to the server and then invite other collaborators to submit comments, refined versions, or entirely new ideas.

Figure 8.

“The Grab Pipe,” a multi-purpose instrument developed by Evan Raskob, “combines the form of a classic woodwind (saxophone, oboe) with modern DJ techniques (crossfader, rotating neck) and tilt/shake sensing.” Participants are encouraged to pick up this ingenious instrument and manipulate it in a variety of ways to create sounds on a synthesizer and images on a computer screen (figure 8).

These and the many other fascinating projects at the ITP Winter Show 2003 illustrate the wide range of inventive ideas and technologies being generated and implemented by ITP students and faculty. For more information about all of the projects displayed at the Winter Show 2003, visit {http://stage.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/projects/show/cgi/view.cgi} Replacement URL: http://itp.nyu.edu/archive/show/winter2003/. Also be sure to keep an eye on the ITP website (http://itp.nyu.edu) for news about the Spring Show 2004, coming in May.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Josh Nimoy for providing photographs of this event: {http://jtnimoy.net/itpwintershow03/}. Thank you to all the organizers and participants of the ITP Winter Show 2003, and especially to Midori Yasuda, George Agudow, and Red Burns.

Footnote

1. {http://www.itp.nyu.edu/PROGRAM/overview.html}
   Replacement URL: http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/object/itp_overview.html