This past Wednesday marked the beginning of the ITP Summer Camp 2011. The ITP is a graduate program at NYU that’s been around for 30 years. It’s a little hard to define, but it’s at the intersection of art, design, and technology and has an excellent alumni network.

The camp has been going for a couple years and it’s meant to be in the style of an un-conference like bar camps and hack days. The idea is for around 50 people to gather and hang out in the same physical space for a month. The space is the 4th floor of a building off Broadway near Washington Square Park in Manhattan, so you can’t really argue with the location. It comes equipped with things like 3D printers and soldering irons and, even more importantly, it comes with staff to train and assist with using that equipment.

The more structured part of the camp occurs in the evenings and weekends as most people are doing some kind of day job. (I’m working in the Department of Music a block over during the day.) The evenings and weekends are filled with sessions lead by ITP staff and camp participants. I’m particularly excited to attend Tom Igoe’s sessions on Basics of Physical Computing using Arduino Part 1, 2, 3, and 4. The full schedule (which is still being added to) can be found here.

I’m going to try and keep up with blogging my experience here, but this is 30 days long, we’re on the 3rd day of it and I’m only just writing the first post.