ITP’s Summer Program Helps Attendees Bring Ideas into Reality
By Jayson Miller
An offshoot of the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) masters program at Tisch, ITP Camp is a four-week evening and weekend program in June that offers working professionals or students in other programs a chance to get their feet wet with cutting-edge technologies. Anyone familiar with ITP knows that its curriculum brings together technology, art, and design. The emphasis is on using technology to turn ideas into reality, and encouraging students to create physical representations of their ideas. ITP Camp encapsulates this same ethos.
Camp-goers have the opportunity to explore a variety of subjects and learn about new industry practices and technology. Past camp sessions have covered topics such as 3D printing, game design, interactive video installations, motion mapping, virtual reality, drone journalism and open source cellular networks.
The camp also functions as an incubator for individual projects and provides a collaborative space where new ideas often turn into active projects. Participants can pursue and collaborate in areas in which they already work, or they can choose to join others in exploring new paths. They are challenged to grow and learn about subjects in which they have no previous experience.
Alex Wagner attended for the first time in 2016 and talked about how camp sessions helped him expand his knowledge into new areas. “I got really into 3D printing which I never did before. I took a 3D model of an elephant and then sliced it in 123D Make and then glued it all together and 3D printed a little dowel to go through it. All that felt like a major accomplishment even though it’s just a small model. I learned a lot.”
ITP Camp is atypical in that it affords participants not only the opportunity to learn, but also to teach. Camp attendees are invited to share what they know with others and lead group activities or breakout sessions of their own.
“I got to lead a section on sound composition. That was a lot of fun because it was a hodgepodge of different things, and then after that we were just jamming on different devices so it was pretty cool,” said Sadah Espii Proctor, who also attended in 2016.
Something cool must be happening each summer as evidenced by previous camp-goers who return year after year. Jody Culkin has joined every year since it began in 2010. “I’ve come to every single camp; I seem to be a Camp lifer. ITP Camp is kind of like camp when you’re a kid and you have friends that you only see at camp, so there’s a bunch of campers who’ve come here for many years and I only see them in June.”