raffertyesque

Show of hands, who made a baking soda volcano for a grade school science fair at some point growing up? Uh huh. Okay, how about the ol’ potato with toothpicks growing roots down into a mason jar? All right, okay. Now what about programming a software application for editing video using artificial intelligence? No? Notsomuch? Huh. What about the player piano that makes different mixed drinks depending on what song it’s playing? Nothing? Surely one of you has designed a series of butt plugs based on the 2012 GOP primary poll numbers, though. Right? Anybody?

Oh, wow. You know what, I just realized the problem here. I’m confusing grade school science fairs with New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Wow. This is embarrassing.

Perhaps not as embarrassing as the Michele Bachman butt plug, though. That little fella is just sad.

New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program— better known as ITP— is part of the Tisch School of the Arts. It was founded in 1979 by dude and a chick, George Stoney and Red Burns (who just stepped down as Chair of ITP last year) (go Red), with the goal of fostering creative growth the budding field of telecommunications. George and Red lobbied Congress to create public access television years earlier, so you can thank them for Mystery Science Theater 3000… and, well, many many other terrible terrible things. Things.

In 1979, ITP was mostly about video production; it’s difficult to describe exactly what it is today, though. Sure, it’s a two year NYU graduate program with about 230 students enrolled, but that’s not doing it justice. I think “MIT by way of New York City” isn’t a bad descriptor. Red, I hope you’re cool with that.

You see, whereas MIT students use their smarts to create robots and invent new types of fuel cells and develop algorithms to predict food shortages, ITP students use their smarts to design Kinect-powered interactive sandboxes, pianos that mix cocktails and, well, butt plugs.

In short, ITP is really smart people using their smarts not for smart people things, but for art.

The reason I know any of this is that twice a year ITP opens its doors and shows off what its students have been working on for the past few months. It’s a science fair for smartypantseses.

I try to attend the show at least one semester a year, if not both. The Spring 2012 show was this past week and it was as crazy as ever.

As is typically the case, it was about a 50/50 split between “art” booths and, well, I’m not sure what to call the other booths. Let’s just call them “other” booths.

The art booths are things like the girl who makes music out of speaker feedback (“I wanted to make something beautiful out of something ugly”) or the guy who made the tiny hall of mirrors out of a LCD display (“it kind of smells funny”).

The “other” booths are usually still artistic, but usually do something functional as well. Like the skateboard with self-illuminating LEDs (“skate safe, brah”), or the human-powered Google search engine (“ask it anything, maybe you’ll get a response in a week or two”).

Well, I suppose there’s also a third category of booth. I would describe these as the “wasting their parents’ money” booths. They are the proverbial Pat Raffertys of the ITP program. Clearly they put off their booth until the last minute and they’re not hiding it well.

These are the kids who bought a Microsoft Kinect the night before, plugged it into their MacBook and turned on the screensaver, pitching it as an “fully-immersive motion-tracking augmented-reality” hoping no one would notice.

For every Slack Rafferty monkeying with a Kinect, though, there are some pretty neat Kinect hacks. The past few ITP shows have essentially turned into “let’s do weird shit with the Microsoft Kinect” shows.

Throw your arms in the air to conduct a Kinect orchestra. Throw your arms in the air to make the Kinect generate a fireworks display based on your movements and voice. Throw a ball in the air and have the Kinect judge your bocce skills. Throw your pants on the ground and have the Kinect make a butt plug designed just for you.

I made that last one up.

Generally I tend to prefer the “other” booths. Sort of arty, but more functional, sometimes even educational. Some of the highlights from this semester’s show included:

• The camera that didn’t take pictures, but took descriptions, printing out a text description of whatever you shot moments after the picture was taken, like a Polaroid by way of Satan.
• The robot that scraped your company’s email list and turned it into a fantasy sport. Try not to tell your boss, because you can’t win if he fires you.
• The futuristic bathroom stall graffiti booth (located in the bathroom).
• And of course, this being an election year, and this being New York City, there were a fair number of left-leaning political booths. There were two separate booths about women’s reproductive rights, a diorama (because it wouldn’t be a science fair without at least one diorama) about the 1%, and a booth about the GOP primary candidates and their, well, you know.

When they created ITP, George and Red did a good thing for the world. Sure, the MIT kids might be the ones who ultimately save the us with their highfalutin book learnin’, but it’s the ITP kids who are going to distract us in the mean time with their fully-immersive motion-tracking augmented-realities.

Waitaminute, this is just a Kinect that you plugged into your MacBook!

That is a really nice screen saver, though.