The Kids Are Alright: Video Art at NYU

NEW YORK, NY — The sense of playful enthusiasm was infectious at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) Spring 2007 show hosted at their study space in the Tisch School of the Arts building on Tuesday. Students presented class projects and their finished theses as graduates around campus paraded about Washington Square Park in royal purple caps and gowns.

NYU Tisch ITP Spring 2007 Show -- Photo by Mike Dory

There were dozens and dozens of eye-catching projects which ranged from technological solutions for a sustainable environment and assistive devices for the elderly and disabled to network-enabled real world gaming devices and other stuff that just made you go “woah, neat!” But I was especially intrigued by the number and variety of web-enabled video efforts, and would like to present some highlights.

Ambient TV: A design proposal and mockup by Myra Rebecca Einstein for a new interactive video viewing model. Best suggested feature? “Friends’ Most Recently Watched,” to see what your social network is watching, which would be easy enough to implement in something like Joost or YouTube for example.

Distributed Surveillance Company: Anyone at anytime could presumably tune into YouAreBeingWatched.org and watch live video video streams from the halls of ITP, alerting someone when there’s something amiss. I have to admit, this project from Christin Roman, Charles Pratt, Tikva Roseanne Stone Haendel Morowati and Mike Bukhin was a tad “Little Brother” for my taste, but interesting nonetheless.

Tech Trek TV: Want to keep up with what’s going on behind the scenes at ITP? Caleb John Clark and Anh Nguyen produce and Rucyl Mills hosts Tech Trek TV, a vlog show for non-technical audiences explaining the work at the lab. Clark is an intern at popular video-sharing service Blip.tv, and the team promises more episodes to come.

Vlogbot: The effusive Steven A. Jackson has already launched his thesis project for beta testing — Vlogbot is a video podcast index and subscription service he built from the ground up. It crawls the web in search of feeds to add to the directory automatically, as well as allowing fans or creators of a show to submit a feed.

MotionMemoriesWall: Using technology from site My30Seconds.net, Kaki Law put together a way to allow participants in an event to document it live by uploading clips to a live web ‘video wall,’ which can then be shared in real time with interested parties worldwide or archived for posterity.

A former NYU Tisch student myself, I have to admit to feeling a tinge of Violet pride. Also, a bit jealous — while I was being introduced to antique production techniques in the Film and Television program, a few floors down they were working on the future of interactive digital media. Maybe when the inevitable “Dot Bomb 2.0″ hits I’ll apply for the graduate-level program and rack up some student loan debt instead of collecting unemployment.

Photo by Mike Dory.

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