ITP Part 1: Leif Krinkle
Of all the things I have encountered in my newspaper work covering the arts, my absolute favorite is the New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program — or ITP. This is a graduate program that, as their Web site puts it , offers students a chance to “explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives.”
The program also likes to call itself the “Center for the Recently Possible.”
In other words, it’s a gathering of mad scientists, coming up with crazy and wonderful contraptions that sometimes help you in unexpected ways, other times make you think unexpected thoughts, and still others just give you a good giggle.
A number of these folks have had shows at the nearby Greylock Arts, a gallery in Adams, MA (helmed by former Shuffleboil contributor Marianne Petit and her very good buddy Matthew Belanger) and I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to and writing articles on several of them. I’m putting up the interviews in order to give people a chance to really get to know what goes on at ITP and what sorts of cool folks are doing it.
I’m starting with Leif Krinkle, a man of boundless energy and imagination.
SB: The Krinkle-O-Tron expands the notion of collaboration to include the audience.
LK: It came more from a theoretical perspective, when I first created it, I started making, when I came to ITP, the first question I had was ‘I make these big interactive installations and performance pieces, what kind of space do you have?’ ‘None.’ For about a year and a half, I made really small prototypes. With the Krinkle-O-Tron, even with these small prototypes I had been making with scan imagery and large multi screen displays, so I wanted to make an installation that was able to not only create but display these large format medias in real time and in doing so create some sort of physical interaction with them. That’s what the carousel was and I realized that I was trying to push the boundaries of what new media and electronic media had to offer and I thought that one of the boundaries is obviously power consumption, so I thought ‘Well, let’s see if we can figure out some way to offset the consumption of power or at least bring that to discussion. That’s where the sustainable aspect of this came in.
Different crowds interact differently, it’s more of the culture that you display it in. Interactive art is pretty new and people don’t really come to a gallery or an art show thinking that they’re going to interact or break a sweat or do something in order to fully experience the art.
Coming from a burning man background, where there are no spectators, you all have to participate, a lot of the people I’m around influenced me and inspired me to create things that require effort and group participation, so around here, there’s definitely a lot of people who hop on and start going. Marianne can’t keep off the thing. In Greylock, they’re around Mass MoCA and I imagine the east coast is a little more progressive on the coast than where I grew up in Michigan, so I found it. There was a 90 year old woman jumping on it and kids love it — kids use it way better than adults. I think adults are more concrete in their ideas of what is proper to do in a group of people and riding around on scooters doesn’t figure as one of them, so I think the adults take a little more coaxing.
