NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program turned 40 this past weekend. I graduated from ITP right before the dot com bust. I was a kid…
Red’s old roost. She was bold, opinionated and tough as nails. Visiting here was both terrifying and inspiring.
NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program turned 40 this past weekend. I graduated from ITP right before the dot com bust. I was a kid, but we worked, played and created so hard, it feels like yesterday. ITP just moved to a great new space in Brooklyn and is entering its next phase. I visited this past weekend and it’s beautiful. But it was bittersweet too because ITP’s founder, Red Burns, is no longer with us and I miss her voice.
Red launched the first incarnation of ITP in 1971, in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It morphed into its current form in 1979, long before the term “startup founder” had any cache (or cliche, for that matter). The 70s were a heady time for art in New York, and ITP married the experimental, cultural and political elements of the downtown scene with new forms of communication and emerging consumer technologies like portable video, cable TV and telephony. Tech has always moved fast, Red was smart and let ITP surf the waves of change. By the time I got there, we were hacking mobile phones, web servers, Palm Pilots, discarded appliances, microcontrollers and hot glue to create novel, weird, funny and (rarely) profitable forms of technology. ITP kept right on moving after I left — they taught Making Critical Art With Machine Learning last week.
ITP was not designed to be a startup incubator, not even close. But inevitably some students do create startups, and so it winds up that you can’t throw a rock in New York’s tech scene without hitting an alum. I like to think that the school is part of the reason New York has always had a more social, diverse and artsier vibe to its startups than the West Coast. I’m thinking of companies like Etsy, Tumblr, Kickstarter, Foursquare and Vimeo, to name a few. In fact, Foursquare was founded by ITP grads and their lead investor, Fred Wilson, a celebrated investor in nearly all of those name-checked companies, said this about ITP:
“…it’s gotten to the point that ITP has pretty much infected all of NY’s tech companies. And that’s a good thing…I think ITP is one of the things that makes NY’s tech/web community what it is. It’s a combination of art/design/technology/media and it’s a special place that turns out special people who do special things.”
The recipe for special people who do special things was Red’s secret sauce, a diverse and multidisciplinary approach to technology. Engineers are matched with dancers, architects with painters, and when I attended, an intro course where folks like Clive Davis, Douglas Rushkoff and Laurie Anderson gave us peeks into their values and careers. Red wanted a program rich with international students of all ages and experiences. Perhaps most importantly, there was a strictly enforced 50/50 balance of men and women. Red knew that technology was a man’s world and she also knew that women had to be an equal part of that world, because technologists were creating the future. Given the diverse, fertile ground, perhaps it’s not surprising that while most projects don’t live past a semester, alumni have gone on to design transit systems, release seminal artworks, launch high-growth companies and organize protests (including the Women’s March in 2017).
ITP survived the dot com bust and it will survive the next one too because what makes it special isn’t beholden business models. ITP is special because it’s a more humane vision of technology, where technology becomes a way to be more human, to connect, inform, delight and challenge people. People — not machines, not profits, not just beer-swilling bros — people of all stripes, colors, ages, backgrounds, skills and genders were at the center of technology, for Red. It’s a more lasting and wholistic view of technology — who gets to make it and design our future — because it’s a more accurate view of the world that will eventually use it.
I love technology, but what the hell happened these last few years? Trolling, sexism, pedophile financiers, mega-monopolies, imploding unicorns, threats to our news, information and democracy… It’s starting to feel like Act 2 of that same dot com bust from yesteryear with even higher stakes. I miss Red, but she had a succession plan and ITP is being run by that core, awesome crew that supported her all those years ago when I attended. They enter the institution’s 40th year in a brand new home, with twice the space, at just the right time. The tech world desperately needs what they have to teach. Dan O’Sullivan, the current chair, calls ITP a “center for the recently possible.” I’d like to think of it as the playground to create Act 3, a better future with technology by humans, for humans.
With Red at ITP’s 30th (sorry lowlight cams sucked then) / Mural in the lobby of ITP’s new home