Do a creative project every day for five straight days, starting Monday, July 28th 2008
Projects must be completed in a day, so they need to be as compact as they are creative
Each project needs a name and documentation posted by the end of the day. It should be a stand-alone accomplishment
Click Hanger
By Andrea Dulko on Day 3
Josh and I are paying tribute to everyone’s second-favorite (after Plinko) Price Is Right game. Mouse clicks/moves are nearly unconscious. Once you become aware, it’s quite maddening (sorry to do that to ya). Going with this, we’ve decided to count the number of mouse clicks made per day and have them correspond with our own little online Cliff Hanger’s upward progress. I’ve fond that there’s a lot more documentation on click recording for PC so hopefully we’ll be able to work something out and have him climbing by EOD. Your friends will be so impressed when they check the site and see how far you’ve clicked! STAY TUNED!
| July 31st, 2008
Day 1 Overview
By Robert Faludi on Day 1, Overview
It’s the first day of 5 in 5 and there’s a parade of projects. See the gang free themselves from Positioning Systems, choose their food decisively, sash a speaker, stick socks to a tee, mate software circles, print Mega Man, enliven their claw prizes, greet with robots, calm a TV, root for poops, Eco-nomize a billfold, season some mittens, dramatize their voicemail, cut their own coins and Franken their Faces. This motivated group of ITP students and their Guest Star, Bre Pettis did each project in a single day and they’ll do another four each this week for a total of around 50 different projects in five days!
| July 31st, 2008
Flash Prototyping Workshop
By David Steele Overholt on Day 3
Today I’m launching a website that has been in the making for a while now – FlashPrototyping.com (see the launch e-mail).
As my project for today, I’m putting together a workshop here in San Diego, CA on using Flash as a prototyping tool. It’s being held from 4pm-7pm at Point Loma Nazarene University in the Ryan Library Mac Lab.
| July 31st, 2008
Re-branding Bed-Stuy to Promote Gentrification
By Robert C. Moon on Day 3
I living in Manhattan for the past two years while I attended ITP in a neighborhood appropriately named “Alphabet City,” East of the East Village. My roommate at the time lived there for 11 years before I moved in and always talked about how much the neighborhood underwent quite the dramatic change, both good and bad. Such changes he was referring to was gentrification. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines gentrification as “the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents.”
So after I graduated, I started looking for places out in Brooklyn and like many people, I started my search on Craigslist. I’m sure every person looking for a place in New York City has seen listings purposely miscategorized by real estate agency, in the hope of getting a user to click to view details or even worse, get you to make the trek to see the place. One of my favorite examples is the listing of “East Williamsburg,” when in actuality the place is in Bushwick proper. By re-branding less attractive neighborhoods, real estate agencies are hoping to get people on the border of barely affording “nicer” neighborhoods to living comfortably in a “poorer” and often urban area of town. They are usually artists, then students, then hipsters and not for long rents prices go up, ultimately pushing local residents further away. The neighborhood landscape changes as well. Not for long, liquor stores and 24 hour pickup or delivery greasy food establishments are replaced by Whole Foods grocery stores and cafes serving 8 ounce wheat-grass beverages for 4 dollars. The beneficial side effect of gentrfication is that crime levels often drop significantly. My guess is the police is willing to protect the well-off than the poor and struggling.
So in the beginning of May, I moved out to Bedford-Stuyvenant, often referred as “Bed-Stuy.” This neighborhood has yet to become “gentrified,” but earlier signs indicate such a change will occur sooner than later (after all, I moved in and I’m a student). I was walking home recently and because of the recent hot weather, families would sit outside, often late. A young girl, could not have been older than 8 years old sees me walking past her and she says to her father siting on the stoop, “Why is all these white people walking down our street?” I quickly replied to correct her to say, “I’m not white, I’m Korean,” which was followed by an uncontrollable laughter of her father. She doesn’t know it at the time, but that girl is talking about gentrification.
For my 5-in-5 project, I decided I wanted to silk-screen t-shirts, printed with the re-branded name of “East Fort Greene.” I wanted to beat real estate agencies to the punch, and bring awareness of changes in the neighborhood of Bed-Stuy. I would like to be clear in stating that I am neither for or against the gentrification process. There are both positive and negative effects of such changes but ultimately the real estate agencies make out on top. I did not anticipate the preparation needed to start silk-screening as well as the expenses needed to fund such a project. So today I spent the majority of my time building screens for the pressing the image onto the t-shirts and designing the image/text for the shirts.I also learned that it takes around 12 hours for the photo emulsion to dry, before a single print can be made. So in the mean time, here is my design for the t-shirts I will be printing tomorrow as well as write/shoot/edit a film with Christian.
4 comments | July 30th, 2008
SnapCoat
By Andrea Dulko on Day 2
Go hands-free! Great for travel. Enjoy all the benefits of the Hip Pack without taking attention away from you fab outfit.
1 comment | July 30th, 2008
Japanese Family Crests
By Tim Szetela on Day 2
As I mentioned in my last post, I had gotten a lot of stuff on my trip to Japan. I particularly liked this small book I got that is filled with thousands of family crests from Japan. The crests are each really great highly-designed symbols. For a while I have wanted to animate these, to show many of them at once and to show the visual differences between each of them. So for the Tuesday project, I captured the images of a couple hundred of these, aligned and cleaned up the photos, and then animated them as a series. Also, I wanted to project them in a space to give them more presence and texture. A still of the projection is below. A link to the video of the various projections is also below.
3 comments | July 30th, 2008
Laser Activated
By Vikram Tank on Day 2
Today for my 5 in 5 project I assembled a trigger for camera flashes that is activated by a laser and used it to take some photos of a piece of ice landing in water. I have wanted a device like this for a very long time. A laser trigger allows you to fire a camera or a flash when a object breaks the laser beam. It is essential for high speed photography, and it makes other photo tasks such as position based photography possible. I am mainly interested in it for taking still life photos. I also needed to have my unit interface with the Pocketwizard triggering system that I currently use.
8 comments | July 30th, 2008
Rootpoops 1.0 (again)
By Andrea Dulko on Day 1
OK. I couldn’t let this go. Thanks to all who contributed (tried to) yesterday. Unfortunately, I was forced to take a different technical approach and, in frustration, made some hasty deletions. BUT!! We’re up and running, so please leave your cheers for people trying to use the toilet by calling 212.796.0729 ext 181.
Here’s what my extensions.conf file looks like:
The ${UNIQUEID} variable allows each message to be save with an individual name.
I have another file in the same directory (public_html/sounds/) of the itp asterisk server as the folder where the messages are being saved:
Thats pretty much it. The above links.php file lists all of the saved messages on a site. Seems simple, but man did this take me a while to figure out (permissions,etc)! I’ll go into what didn’t work some other time. But until then, don’t for get to make a call!!
OH YEA! Check out the results at andreadulko.com/rootpoops
Thanks,
Ang
| July 30th, 2008
twbasic: BASIC for Twitter
By Adam Parrish on Day 2
My day 2 project is called twbasic. It’s an implementation of classic, line-numbered, home computer-era BASIC that runs on top of Twitter. You can start using twbasic right now by twittering your program listing to @twbasic. Here’s how to get twenty rolls of a six-sided die:
@twbasic 10 for i = 1 to val(ARG$)
@twbasic 20 print rnd(6) + 1
@twbasic 30 next i
@twbasic run 20
(The above screenshot depicts twbasic providing a listing of the program above, and then the results of running the code.)
A reference for using twbasic can be found after the jump.
1 comment | July 30th, 2008
The Asterisk File Transfer Protocol
By Corey Menscher on Day 2
Dial (212) 796-0729 ext. 160 to access the Asterisk File Transfer Protocol Server!
Today I created a prototype method for transferring files via an Asterisk VoIP PBX. The inspiration came from my early computing days using a an audio cassette recorder to store applications for my first personal computer, a TI-99/4a. Programs were stored on audio cassettes, and were literally transferred to RAM via an audio signal over a 1/8” jack. If you didn’t plug in the jack but instead listened to the files through the cassette player’s speaker, they had an eery digital quality (a lot like a fax machine). So, I decided to recreate this experience over the telephone. If you have an acoustic coupler attached to your computer, you could potentially download files from the system at a blistering 300 baud!
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5 comments | July 30th, 2008
PCompatible Earrings
By Armanda Lewis on Day 2
Today I made the PCompatible Earrings, earrings made of physical computing (pcomp) parts. I wanted a short design exercise since I work today, so yesterday I made these sketches: 
Ultimately, though, I let the components themselves dictate the design. I will let you see which parts you can identify. Here is the finished result!
2 comments | July 30th, 2008
Newtonian Light
By C. Anderson Miller on Day 2
I wanted to see what photographed bouncy balls would look like if they were made of light.
So, I had to make my own.
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3 comments | July 30th, 2008
Videotaping Average Athlete vs. Olympic Athlete
By Robert C. Moon on Day 2
I worked with Christian Bovine and Dennis Crowley for our Day 2 project: Average Athlete versus Olympic Athlete. My day started bright and early at 6 am so I make it on time to meet the two average athletes at the public pool on the corner of Pitt and Houston. We were quite lucky that the pool supervisor let us shoot that day for the 100 meter freestyle. For our next events, we shot the track and field events at the East River Park and ran into camp councilors who helped us properly set up the hurdles and long jump events. And for our final rings event was held at the Neistat Brothers studio where they have a set of rings set up for doing the “muscle up.”
As the person behind the camera, I wanted to match the camera angles with the Olympic trials footage we used for this project. Christian and I edited throughout the evening and set it to render over night. You can check out the video below.
Special thanks to our track & field experts:
Nandi Dozier-Lewis, Andrew Olsen and Stephanie Velez
And our rings expert:
Van Neistat
| July 30th, 2008
StopMotionCasting, equality in human machine pixel collaboration.
By John Dimatos on Day 2
StopMotionCasting from john dimatos on Vimeo.
A few months ago, I noticed that it was quite mesmerizing to flip through all my photos in Adobe Lightroom by holding down the right arrow and just letting it go crazy. I thought it would be fun for my second project to use that fascination as the jumping point for a stop motion movie using a years worth of photos.
I have a habit of taking a whole mess of photographs with different exposures and focal lengths especially when I’m using old manual lenses. Because of that, there are sets within the lot that amount to teeny shorts of time lapse animation. But since I’m using a years worth of photographs (3773 photos), the time lapse doesn’t carry throught-out. Instead, it transitions to representing the intended chronology and the photographer behind the camera as the unifying themes.
1 comment | July 30th, 2008
Tickets to the Sunset
By David Steele Overholt on Day 2
After living in beautiful San Diego, California for a period of time, you start to take ocean sunsets for granted. Because I’m only in town for another couple of weeks, I want to make sure I don’t do the same, but I also want to help my fellow San Diegan do the same. Today I’m creating a complete event package and traveling to Sunset Cliffs Natural Park to give out tickets to the sunset.
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6 comments | July 30th, 2008
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