CNMAT Summer School 2008

Recently, CNMAT at UC Berkeley held their annual MaxMSP/Jitter summer school classes at their beautiful Arch St. facility just off the UC campus. This year, for the second year in a row, I had the pleasure of teaching the Jitter Night School - a 3-night intensive of focussed tutorials covering a variety of Jitter topics.

The CNMAT Summer School has gained the reputation around the SF Bay Area of being the place to go for anyone looking to improve their patching chops. It seems this reputation has begun to spread around to other parts of the world. This year, we had a really great group, with students flying in from all over the country (and even a couple of people from Australia!) to get their dose of Max from the wizards. In addition to the Jitter Night School, there was a MaxMSP Day School taught by Michael Zbyszynski, the Sensor Workshop with Adrian Freed, and the more advanced MaxMSP Night School taught by Ali Momeni. To my amazement Richard Andrews, the Associate Director at CNMAT, informed me that most of the students had signed up for all of the classes.

Nevertheless, by the time I taught my class, which is the last class in the series, all of the students were still engaged, interested, and ready to dive into some video processing. I was totally impressed. This year, there was also a lot of interest in using the Jitter matrix to manage data for other types of processes besides video. I look forward to seeing what all of my students come up with!

To supplement the intense educational experience, Ali usually puts together a little party on the last night of the Night School, featuring artist talks by some more established members of the MaxMSP/Jitter community. This year, the Friday night guest list included Paul DeMarinis, Sue-C, and Bob Ostertag, and rumor has it that David Zicarelli made a cameo appearance on Wednesday night as well. As with any public event that I go to, it was really fantastic to meet and talk face to face with some of the people who regularly contribute to the forum community, as well as new users with some fresh ideas about how to use Max for their next project.

If you missed out on this year's summer school classes, keep an eye on the CNMAT website for information about next year's series, and check out our Learn page for other educational institutions that are teaching Cycling '74 software.