Red Burns
ITP Alum Tarikh Korula published an article in Medium about Red Burns and ITP's 40th Anniversary.
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.
Read more here.