Hunkering down at 370 Jay Street in Brooklyn for a whopping 12 hours, a group of NYU students, alongside creatives from peer schools and local hacker organizations, put their heads together on Saturday to engineer absurd inventions — a device that binds you to your last pinky promise and a table that curses when you lean on it, just to name a few. These bizarre devices target oddly specific — and stupid — goals.
Organized by the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU’s ITP Stupid Hackathon served as a space for underground experimentation and a playground for silliness. The event challenged participants to use different forms of digital and physical technology to design the stupidest inventions possible.
“It is a great convention where you can exchange ideas,” event organizer and Tisch senior Anshula Saha said. “[Interactive Media Arts has] a class called Useless Machines, and it forces us to think critically. What if we don’t have to solve a problem? You do it for the sake of doing it. It’s like technological poetry.”
The competition’s emphasis on communal critical thinking drew hackers from all over the city. Contestants fought for awards like “AI Could Never Create This” and “Actually Good, Not Stupid Enough,” motivating them to push the bounds of their creativity.
If you have some promises to keep, the legally-binding pinky promise box created by Tisch graduate students Callie Page, Nasif Rincon and Noah D’Orazio prints out a receipt that binds you to the sacred ritual of the pinky promise. Or, if you’re practicing patience, Tisch graduate students Nikolai Kozak and Surya Narreddi created a Google Chrome extension that adds gravity to the web, making it impossible to reach the top of a webpage as you endure the weight of “gravitational resistance.”
In another corner of the room, Tisch sophomores Audrey Guo and Link Wang and first-years Charles Zhang and Mumu Li wanted to channel their frustration with the boring design of the tables at the IMA Studio. They used artificial intelligence to emulate emotion and detect objects, creating a sassy pink table that would not only shake off any item you place on it, but mock you like a valley girl.
“We wanted to give the table characteristics,” Li said. “For example, the table is really particular with their outfit. They don’t want colors that clash with their table cloth — they care about their overall aesthetic a lot.”
If you’re in the market for a virtual pet that dies if you don’t hit your vape enough, attendees Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho used a 32-bit microcontroller to create the “Vapeagotchi” — an adult spin-off of the Tamagotchi toy from the ‘90s.
“Originally, the idea was to do this for good, because I would like to quit vaping,” Xun, who was invited by an ITP student, said. “But it’s more fun and more stupid if we use this power and harness it for evil and make myself more addicted.”
By encouraging participants to think unconventionally, the Stupid Hackathon strays from traditional college hackathons across the country. Creative methods like fabrication, hacking and generative art are used simply to create — it’s silly, scrappy and fun.
“The stupidity is ultimately just a cover,” Tisch senior and event organizer Lachlan Campbell said. “[It’s] about making something that doesn’t serve capitalism and isn’t extractive.”
Contact Sara Sharma at [email protected].
