notes on camp

interactive telecommunications

I spent June at camp, which isn’t something I have had reason to say for the past fifteen years or so.

This one was called ITP Camp, a sort of four-week ad hoc redux of NYU’s ITP¹ grad program held at their Brooklyn campus. I wanted to go because it seemed like the sort of place where I could lay out these janky little toolsets of mine — the almost-year of self-taught programming, the decade-plus of writing and editing both professionally and not, the even-more-decades-than-that of crafting and gaming and being a person in the world — and see if they began to add up to something tangible. 

There were about 200 of us who attended, along with a dozen or so staffers; many people had gone to camp before and/or to the school itself and many, like me, had not. Some, like me, already lived in New York (my apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from campus, a true logistical blessing), and others came in for the month or for the summer. I worked in the mornings and early afternoons² and then would head up for classes; others worked full-time and came only in the evenings, and still others rearranged their contracts and schedules to focus on camp for the entire stint.

There was a shared calendar where class sessions were listed, and for the most part we could freely choose whichever we wanted to attend. Staffers and campers could teach sessions, and they ranged in structure from low-key discussions to multi-part programming mini-bootcamps. Many of the sessions had tactile components — I took classes on circuitry, laser cutting, immersive theater, arcade controller design, and screen printing, among other topics — and there was a whole host of offerings about physical computing that I’d like to dive into more in the future.

Mostly, I went to sessions on things like interactive and narrative storytelling, and game-making, and some foundational coding topics I’ve missed out on in my patchy autodidactic journey. I joined discussions about creativity and failure and how to make making things sustainable and insight into others’ artistic and technical practices. I managed to bring up Tears of the Kingdom at every possible opportunity. (Despite my best efforts, I did come away with Opinions About AI, which I will maybe write about in a future installment but also might sublimate into abstraction and never speak of aloud.)

What it was all about was making things: what and how and why ranged widely, but that was the central driving force of the month. The directive, both tacit and explicit, was to make a lot of stuff, and accept that it mattered because you did it, and show people, and then make something else.

I found this enormously difficult, and enormously meaningful. This whole last year has been an exercise in relearning how I create, how I learn in the first place, but for the most part it’s been on my own. That’s not to say I haven’t been helped at every beat by friends and strangers, because I absolutely have; it’s more that the work I’ve been doing has been entirely self-directed, at a pace I set, and I’m the sole arbiter over what state anyone else ever sees it in. (Which too often is “never.”)

That wasn’t the case at camp, by virtue of the fact that everyone was working on something and everyone else wanted to hear about it and poke at it and play around with it at every possible opportunity, self included. This forced me to get over myself and any sense that whatever I shared with people had to be “done” or even at all legible, which in turn compelled me to make a whole lot more, to be open to feedback and ideas that pushed me in directions I wouldn’t have considered on my own. There was a silent but strong social contract that we would be open with one another, with no sense of competition, and that openness was repaid with great generosity.

I was startled, honestly, by how many people I met who I think I’ll stay friends with, who I’m excited to get to know better and whose work I want to engage much more deeply with, and then I felt silly for being startled, because I don’t really know how you could achieve the one effect without the other, the openness without the intimacy. The atmosphere was heady and heightened the way a compressed period of time can get with the right social alchemy; by the last week I wanted to spend every free moment on campus, working on my projects and talking with other people about theirs; I went out on more weeknights in a row than I have since I stopped drinking. I anticipated that I’d feel a true loss when it was all over, those familiar but long-forgotten post-camp blues, and I was right.

June was not, by any measure, a stress-free period of creativity and campfire bonding; honestly it was one of the hardest months I’ve had in a long time. Work was manageable but demanding, and a series of high highs and low lows detonated in my personal life at a breathtaking clip. It wasn’t just the sheer quantity of tasks I had to do each day, but the energy required to toggle between mindsets: editor or manager or partner or friend, extruded into the role of student or maker or whatever I was with often just a few minutes’ turnaround time. Most nights I would fall asleep so exhausted I couldn’t keep my eyes open a beat longer; the few instances I couldn’t drift off, despite or because of all of the above, translated into weak, watery panic the next morning. There were at least two distinct moments when I thought about quitting the program, the one truly optional part of my life, but I didn’t, thank God.

There was a showcase the last week of camp during which many people displayed projects, some in mediums they had come in already grasping and others created entirely with skills picked up over the course of June. One friend 3D printed a song; another made an animation with frames plastered all over the city; I helped design a project with another where the user’s cursor rebels in all sorts of increasingly frustrating ways.

My personal final project was sort of a cheat, because I’d had the idea for it before coming to camp. Back in April I kept a series of five journal entries in my beloved Crochet interface for Yarnspinner (basically a node-based text engine), thinking I might want to turn them into some sort of interactive game experiment. That’s what I wound up doing, and the result is here. It’s only available on desktop right now (although a medium-range goal of mine is to optimize it for mobile since I think it would live even better there) and is more of a prototype than anything else. I’m extremely proud of it, though, even while I don’t even really know what “it” is; it’s not quite a game, not quite a personal essay, but contains elements of both that make me so excited to do more. It feels like the first time I’ve allowed the writing to freely operate alongside the game-making, like introducing a new cat to a long-time feline resident after a stint on opposite sides of a door.

That’s sort of a precious metaphor but my cat is right now purring alongside me, and as of this moment the major crises have been dealt with, and it feels so good to have new people and a new resolve and the sense that I’ve been here all along, that I’m coming back to myself, that there are things I will make that I haven’t thought of yet. Not bad for a month.

1. It stands for Interactive Telecommunications Program, although I confidently told about two dozen people it was the “Integrated Telecommunications Program” before realizing my mistake. And like, honestly……………………same diff.

2. Shoutout to my boss and coworkers for making this happen — the month wouldn’t have been possible without Vox’s support. I came away with roughly fifty thousand half-baked ideas for how to apply all of this in a journalist context (a nonzero part of me just wants to make my version of that Bloomberg game about dying malls).