Coursework, notes, and progress while attending NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)

Author Archives: jas920

Packet Sniffing

Some general stuff I learned about data packets sent over the internet: Packets have a header and a payload (or body), and a trailer (which I understand really just indicates the end of the packet). I found this nice definition that explains the header includes 20 bytes (usually) of metadata about the payload including things […]

Traceroute: visualizing web detours

For my traceroute project I ran traceroute to sites I commonly visit as well as sites I thought would be interesting to route, from places I usually connect to the internet. I downloaded iNetTools for my phone to run traceroute from my phone.  I wrote a short python script to get the geolocations for each […]

Soil micro-environments with augmented reality

For the final I experimented with projection and augmented reality (Unity & Vuforia) to tell the story of how plants remediate their environments. I narrowed this down to phytoremediation with sunflowers, specifically, to make this manageable for a week-long project. Sunflowers accumulate lead from the soil, but like all bioremediators, they then become toxic themselves. […]

Ready Player One

Ready Player One has been appropriately critiqued for being a superficial page-turner, propelled forward by pages on pages of cultural references and tired tropes. These aspects of the book made it exhausting to read, but there were nonetheless a some compelling ideas: the parallels of this VR-scape to the present day internet–particularly around its corporatization, […]

3D Avatars & Unity

This week we scanned ourselves using structure sensors and Skanect, to create 3D avatars that we can animate in Mixamo. It was difficult to get a good scan: things to consider were keeping the sensor level, maintaining a wifi connection with the computer running Skanect, moving the sensor in the right direction at the right […]

NYC sewage system: toilet projection

I recently went on a Newtown Creek audio tour, a project by ITP professor Marina Zurkow, & alums Rebecca Lieberman & Nick Hubbard, where I learned many things I didn’t know about the sewage processing facility there. I was already fascinated by how cities process sewage and where there are opportunities to intervene to create […]

Hansel & Gretel with Twine

I teamed up with Angela Wang to re-imagine the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.” You can play here. Our first step was to deconstruct the story to its main elements, symbols, and themes. We wanted to maintain important aspects but play with other elements: character portrayal, setting, plot. After a lot of ideation that included ideas […]

Ricoh Theta: in-class experiment

In class we experimented with 360 photo and video using the Ricoh Theta camera and software. I ran into issues transferring the footage onto my new macbook using Image Capture, and ended up needing to load the camera as a drive. I took video from different parts of the journey to Bobst library and different […]

Already programmed: responses

Connected, but alone? Sherry Turkle argues in her TED talk, “Connected, but alone?” that too much texting is bad for us: she anticipates the unpopularity of the talk because this isn’t something people or companies want to hear. People are more comfortable with machines, which enable interaction without real emotional risk. But, they also can’t […]

Responses: Sharing on the internet

Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda This analysis sought to examine the media ecosystems during the 2016 election cycle that led to Trump’s ascendance using “hyperlinking patterns, social media sharing patterns on Facebook and Twitter, and topic and language patterns in the content of the 1.25 million stories.” The study points to social […]