Xavier Aaronson’s review for The Creators Project of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) spring exhibition demonstrates the importance of art, technology and play,
Upon entering this year’s show, held this past Monday and Tuesday, I was greeted with a wonderful assault on the senses. The array of Kinect sensors, 3D printing, and musical robotics was overwhelming and damn near titillating to the geek within me. This is no amateur hour at The Apollo. Need I remind you that Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, is an ITP Alumn. Instead, the students are groomed and encouraged to create innovations that overlap between the physical and virtual. Red Burns, founder of ITP calls the showcase “an exhibition of the imagination” and stresses the importance of playful creation.
Motion tracking, robotics, and even electric luminescent wires were featured in the exhibition and so were some game related projects. One of which is FEED ME! By Allison Berman, Blaire Moskowitz and Nelson Ramon. As written from the ITP’s exhibition page,
FEED ME! is an interactive installation game in which participants are asked to help an avatar complete a challenge by virtually and physically feeding it different types of food. The game is intended to teach the basic working principles of the human digestive system including building and deconstructing objects which represent food.
What makes the ITP show so great is to see how play and technology evolve every year. Mark Kleback, Alex Samoilescu and Ali Sajjadi’s Mosh Mural from the exhibition is a great comparative experience to Renaud Hallée and PossibleMetrics‘ Tambour, which we mentioned back in March. Whatever comes next in a post-kinect world will be even more exciting. For more on the projects at the ITP show, click here.
[via Creators Project]