Digital Day Camp

Accessible Smart Cities and the Digital Twin

This year's Eyebeam Digital Day Camp theme is inspired by UN Sustainable Goal 11 to focus on making cities more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. During this course, students will study the accessibility, navigation, and technological aspects of smart cities. With the
combination of new computing models and old forms of governance, smart cities are taking shape. Youth will be challenged to apply creative thinking strategies across a variety of technologies and topics to develop critical, empowering, and long-lasting relationships with technology and their role in it as change agents.

Build your World: Tech Tools for Community Action

DDC 2021 was guided by:

• The role of technology in social movements throughout history, including the impact of earlier examples such as the printing press and radio.
• Technology’s role in activist practices today, both advantages and perils.
• Current issues in technology and influence on social movements: Surveillance and privacy, facial recognition, environmental impact, land rights and housing justice, and more.

Rituals Of Care

During the summer of 2020, Eyebeam hosted its first ever fully (Digital) Day Camp for 30 high school students across the country. Taking into account the moment of multi-crises, this fully digital, arts and technology summer camp was guided by these areas of focus under our theme Rituals of Care:

• Caring for the digital self: privacy, data use, and surveillance
• Caring for the physical self: digital wellness, practices of self & community care
• Reimagining technological and non-technological forms of togetherness

Access

Students considered how art and technology can challenge dominant notions of access and how together we can shape a more equitable future. Workshops included lessons on alt-text, memes, creating digital instruments using Max, and extended reality. View the descriptive schedule here .

Trust

With a focus on the ways in which we trust have been transformed, students looked at critical ways to design methods for critique, communication, and coordination towards a more just world. Workshops ranged from creating zines, to programming activist twitter bots, to live coding their own music.

Power

Workshops responded to Eyebeam’s 2017 residency cohort’s focus on examining relationships between power and technology, and taught students how they can use technology to shift the structure of power through artificial intelligence, virtual realities, internet communication, and more.

Game Craft and Beats, Rhymes & Hacking

Game Craft taught students how to develop their own digital game and create a wearable controller. Beats, Rhymes & Hacking taught students how to make their own electronic musical instruments and create their own music.

Remapping

Students interacted with the community and engaged with neighbors to interpret spaces. The two weeks of camp culminated in final projects inside a unique 10’x10’ intervention/art/performance space nearby DDC’s headquarters.

Mobile App School

Students researched cell phones as tools for creative interaction, learned how to create graphics for mobile devices, and organized all their great ideas into one collaborative mobile app proposal that they pitched to an audience of application developers.

Creative Activism

Students worked with urban planners, software designers, activists, video artists, and even a couple of activist gardeners to dig a little deeper into the fabric of our city to learn more about how we can use art and technology to change it for the better.

Interactivos

This year’s program echoed that of Interactivos?: Interactive art and technology, and the tension between "real" and "fake."

Public Interactions and Street Art

Students engaged in urban research and learned about the practice and theory behind participatory actions, art, and activism. DDC students developed individual and team projects derived from their communities and lives.

Biotechnology

Students studied the fundamentals and ethics behind biological research (i.e., animal testing, germ warfare, bacteria and vaccines, DNA, food growth and nano-technology) and green design, including the politics and groups involved in executing such projects.

History of the Uniform

Students were taught fundamentals of fashion and design, including the politics surrounding uniforms. Students learned basic circuitry and physical computing, incorporating light and sound sensors, LED tags and switches into the uniforms that they prototyped in teams.

Urban Renewal

Students studied the fundamentals of urban planning and design, including the politics and groups involved in executing such projects. DDC participants learned about game design and theory in order to develop interactive projects related to the High Line Project.

Create Change

Students used a variety of software and hardware applications in order to heighten public awareness about specific issues relevant to their lives. They learned to develop innovative forms of expression such as blogging, contagious media, and guerilla broadcasting to get their message out there.

Building for the Void

Teaching artists led workshops that investigated architecture, public art, and memorials in contemporary society with a particular focus on the area destroyed by the September 11th attacks and its impact on the city's collective consciousness.

Digital Music and Sound Composition

Students created interactive interfaces for sound files of mixed interviews and music generated onsite. Sound artists and DJs from New York City as well as technicians from sound organizations provided lectures and professional critiques.

Media and the Female Image

This all-girl program was designed to encourage media literacy to help provide access to art and technology tools to a statistically underserved group. Teams created an original, digital public service announcement about a relevant social topic using digital video cameras and desktop digital editing equipment.

3-D Design

Students worked on a robotics program using interactive programmable LEGOs, which were invented at MIT Media Lab. The programmable LEGOs can interface with a computer and be programmed to do an amazing number of actions, including creating a moveable robot.

Identity and representation

Teaching artists worked with students on creating web spaces based on building students’ identities. Each student was given training in coding and web development and given the freedom to create a unique online space.