6. NYU-ITP - John Henry Thompson - Invent Your Future
NYU-ITP Visiting Scholar
Beginning Jan 2020, I accepted a position at NYU-ITP as a visiting scholar.
In March 2020 the covid19 pandemic hit and I had to adjust.
I still hope to work on these projects during my sequester in the Flatlands of Brooklyn.
NYU-ITP Brooklyn Research Statement - John Henry Thompson
As technology continues to expand into every aspect of our lives several questions arise: How do we make the best use of it? How do we deal with the pitfalls? Will the leading and more commercially successful trends in technological innovation erode human creativity or augment it? I aim to augment human creativity with technology and empower others to see themselves and the world in new ways. During my return to NYU-ITP my work will focus on these themes: Social Media, Digital Legacy, Creative Learning, and Creative Expression.
Social Media
Popular social media sites such as Facebook/Instagram make it easy for us to share personal media and data with our social network. However, we are beginning to increasingly question the hidden costs and even dangers of a seemingly “free” platform . In July of 2019 Facebook was slapped with the largest fine in the history of the Federal Trade Commission - a record $5 billion for privacy breaches which may have affected a US Presidential election. Let’s imagine that in response to this criminal act, some may choose to boycott Facebook, leave the site and delete their media and data. Others may choose to export their media and data and host it elsewhere. What are the alternatives? Are there other architectures that are both secure and more open that Facebook? Facebook is a closed system - taking advantage of the open web but locking users in and making it difficult for those outside the system to share links.
I have created a suite of scripts to take social media and data from a Facebook account and render it on a more open site such as github. In my time at ITP I hope continue to refine these scripts, make them usable by others and popularize their use.
Digital Legacy
The early authoring application Adobe Director (formerly from a company called Macromedia) was popular in the 1990’s and 2000’s for creating a variety of interactive content for CD-ROM and the web. However, the Adobe corporation retired the application in 2017 effectively killing access to early digital content for current and future computers. Even if someone had the time and resources to build an equivalent Director Player, without access to the original source code this task is extremely difficult, if not impossible. In spite of this, there is a small team of developers lead by Mr. Eugene Sandulenko in The Netherlands who are building on the open source game engine scummvm.org to bring Director content back to life. Although I have a personal interest and connection with Director content, the idea of reviving content and games from earlier systems is not unique to Director. Teenagers these days are scouring Ebay to find early games on other platforms such as Nintendo and there is a robust market for reselling refurbished games and consoles.
Can the Adobe corporation be persuaded to open source a subset of the Director source code to help revive the rich digital legacy of content created in the early years of interactive media? In particular, open sourcing for Lingo, the coding language I invented, would help this effort immensely. What are the legal ramifications and risks of sharing my memories of the Lingo software architecture? What early interactive media content is driving this dedicated group of developers in The Netherlands to spend so much of their time and energy on what could be an impossible task? What lessons can current digital artists learn from this experience? Is there an argument for software companies opening the source for platforms that they phase out? Much like in the pharmaceutical world where, once off patent, drugs are open internationally for generic manufacture?
Creative Learning
Inspired by Seymour Papert’s “The Children’s Machine” and my personal experience making coding accessible to creative professions in the 1990’s, I have aspired to bring coding skills to the high school population. In short 3-4 week workshops I have taught coding using scratch.mit.edu and other free online resources. I have found that due to the short time frame, it is difficult for these workshops to have an enduring impact. While at ITP I aim to research other approaches and expand on my prior efforts to longer time formats and earlier grades, with a particular emphasis on exposing creative coding to African-American youth and other demographic groups that remain underrepresented in the tech world.
Creative Expression
Prompted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s interest in my early interactive digital art I decided to revive DICE, my creative software. I started developing DICE in the early 2000’s following my departure from Macromedia. My early ambition for DICE was to develop a palette of video effects and object detection and use it in a series of interactive art installations. I also hoped to create DICE as an open source platform for others to use and extend. Restarting development in 2017 I shifted the primary platform from MacOS desktop to iOS mobile devices. I have built out the DICE platform to process video locally, and share low bandwidth video and sensor data with a network of devices running the DICE app. DICE is based on parseplatform.org, an open source communication platform, and mongodb.com, an open source object database. With DICE now feature complete, I plan to create an interactive art series for trial installation at ITP. With feedback from the ITP community I plan to refine the installations and incorporate physical computing.