Stories From ITP

A still image of John Goodman in the movie True Stories, performing the Talking Heads song People Like Us.
True Stories, 1986, dir. David Byrne

Hello! Mathew Olson here.

For now, at least, this page is going to serve as a portal to my blogs for classes at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. I'll update the following subheaders with handy-dandy hyperlinks to each blog post as I write them. Subsequent updates on the state of this page (or on the program more generally?) will follow underneath the class listings—9/6/22


COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE

Sketch #5 - ‘Dan’ Fiction
“On a windy evening in Guadalajara, The Gaucho crossed paths with Buzz. The Gaucho, a man who looks like a fool, was just passing through Guadalajara, and had never met the other man before. Buzz had a reputation in town as a tiresome mooch. The two couldn’t have been more

Sketch #4 (Inform 7): Bad Traffic

Sketch #3 (Bitsy): There Is A Hole

Sketch #2 - 10455/10527
Here’s the link to the Twine sketch. Update 2/29: The itch page is now password protected: catn2024 And here’s a picture of what the structure looks like in the editor: I really did set out to find an old personal essay of mine I wrote while in college and
Sketch #1 - Blank White Cards
I think it’d be fair to say I misunderstood the prompt for sketch #1: “create a system for generating stories.” My effort, a card-based system, is definitely designed for generating story ideas. For lack of a more clever name, let’s call it Blank White Cards. My inspiration came

THESIS BLOG

(will archive here soon)
My page on the official ITP '24 Thesis WordPress (password protected)

MULTISENSORY STORYTELLING

Pearl impressions
Notes on Blindness impressions
Gloomy Eyes impressions
Playthings impressions

HEDONOMIC VR DESIGN

Week 2 - Safety infrastructure

PROGRAMMING A2Z

Week 2 - Regex Connections
Week 9 - Markov Chains

INTRO TO FABRICATION

Week 1 - Box - 1/30/23
Week 2 - Bookends - 2/6/23
Week 3 - Laser cut holders - 2/13/23
Week 4 - Enclosure - 2/20/23
Week 5 - Two materials - 2/28/23
Week 6 - Sanding, painting, documentation - 3/7/23

HOMEMADE HARDWARE

Week 2 - ATtiny85 programming jig, capacitive sensing - 2/5/23
Week 3 - Eagle board design for marquee - 2/12/23
Weeks 4 and 5 - Marquee board revision, milling, soldering - 3/2/23
Week 6 - Programming my marquee board - 3/7/23
Week 9 - Components testing and prototype beginnings - 3/26/23
Week 11 - Alpha to Beta - 4/24/23

ELECTRONICS FOR INVENTORS

N/A

THE NEW ARCADE

Class WordPress here.

HYPERCINEMA

Week 1 - Scavengers - 9/1/22
Week 2 - Focus Time - 9/8/22
Week 3 - Falling Toward Something - 9/15/22
Week 4 - In translation - 9/28/22
Week 5 - Duck amuck - 10/6/22
Week 6 - Frame by frame - 10/13/22
Week 7 - Wobbly - 10/20/22
Weeks 8/9 - Zach the Life Influencer - 11/3/22
Week 14 - Cornell Box Project - 12/16/22

INTRO TO COMPUTATIONAL MEDIA

Week 1 - Blog/Homework - 9/6/22
Week 2 - Blog/Homework - 9/13/22
Week 3 - Blog/Homework - 9/20/22
Week 4 - Blog/Homework - 9/27/22

ICM - Pixels
ICM - Sound

Week 14 - ICM & Pcomp - Final

VISUAL LANGUAGE

Week 1 - Taste, Tested - 9/7/22
Week 2 - Thoughts on Hoefler episode of Abstract - 9/14/22

PHYSICAL COMPUTING

Week 1 - "Don't get frustrated, get help!" - 9/7/22
Week 2 - Blink or you'll miss it - 9/14/22
Week 3 - Faster - 9/21/22
Macabre midterm
Week 6 - Midterm madness - 10/12/22
Final project, initial idea - 10/26/22
Final project, refined idea and BOM - 11/9/22

APPLICATIONS

Week 4 - In Class Discussion Notes - 9/28/22 (Link to class WordPress)


UPDATE 0.0
Why choose True Stories for a header image?
I get a bit tetchy at the thought of a page that's just text, especially when using a nice CMS like the one Ghost provides. This happened to be one of the nicer looking images I currently have saved to my desktop, and aside from the obvious reasons—it's a great movie, I love Talking Heads, the associations with my time in undergrad—I can't see any deeper reasons for choosing the image at this time. Maybe I'll swap it out at some point later, or perhaps I'll interrogate the choice more deeply here in the margins as the semester goes on. Who knows!–9/6/22

UPDATE 0.1
About all those images on your site...
Every blog post linked to on this page is made and hosted for the sake of my classes at ITP, and has nothing to do with any professional content I may host elsewhere on this domain (hey, web hosting ain't cheap). For documentation's sake I'll always do my best to credit who made or owns what, but if you're reading this and happen to have any concerns about content on this site, I can be reached at [my first name, no brackets]@virtualvector.xyz