The first "heavy" project I worked on at ITP was for Applications, a class overseen by Red Burns, ITP's founder. Each week Red invites someone from the "new media" industry to discuss their thoughts, work, concerns, and so forth. Subsequently, a group of 4 or 5 students creates a piece in reaction to the previous week's speaker and presents it to the class.
My group (Craig, Tali, Ahn and myself) were given the opportunity to respond to Clay Shirky, a writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of mobile tech and the internet. With only a week to conceptualize, prototype and share our reaction with the class, we knew we had to keep it simple. So, working around Shirky's message of cognative surplus, we developed a system to interact with the class using only their cell phone lights.
Using Processing, we were able to draw on top of a live video feed of the audience, interact with their cell phone lights via shapes, games and words, and save images on command. My favorite part was the music player, which we programmed to play songs written by our fellow students. The audience could change tracks, pause and play a song as well as change the volume.
The experience of drawing a "button" and having it be instantly usable was a welcome shift in reality. It inspired me to dive deeper into what Processing has to offer and served as the "Welcome to ITP" that no faculty member could have offered.