Our Mission…
Ithaca Media Arts was founded and is still directed by Cliff Roth, who has had a varied career in media and technology. Highlights include teaching for a decade at SUNY Cortland’s Media Arts program, and previously at the School of Visual Arts and The Millennium Film Workshop in New York (a pioneering center of experimental / avant-garde cinema), writing about technology for The New York Times and The Washington Post, several executive positions during the first and second dot com waves (he was Director of Interactive Television for Gist Communications, for example, an early TV listings web site), and radio producer for Pacifica and NPR. He was also the editor of a video engineering web site and newsletter run by EETimes magazine. He founded a public access center for cable-TV at Binghamton University as an undergraduate, and received a master’s in Film from San Francisco State University. He’s also an accomplished independent filmmaker, with screenings at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, South By Southwest, AFI, and a standing exhibit at The Museum of The Moving Image.
The following first-person short essay sums up the philosophy and mission of Ithaca Media Arts:
Although Ithaca Media Arts has always had a mission, it crystallized for me in the summer of 2023 with the release of the film “Oppenheimer”.
There are many camps that revolve around specific activities, such as coding, or filmmaking. That’s not us. And we are not about providing career training for eight-year olds.
We are about providing a nurturing, supportive environment where campers explore various facets of technology and media creation. Our activities have changed over the years as tech evolves, embracing robotics and game design and 3D printing and now Artificial Intelligence.
We are NOT training programmers and cinematographers!
We ARE about enabling campers to explore a range of activities, and discovering what interests them. Campers enjoy an atmosphere of fun with each other, while creating interesting and distinctive projects. While campers may learn some valuable skills, it’s not the specific skill that’s our focus. It’s the attitude. We want to spark curiosity and openness to learning for fun. We want campers to feel that media production and technology are interesting, and empowering components of modern society.
This philosophy is hardly original. In the early 1980s, fresh out of college, I got what proved to be probably be the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had in a long career working in various aspects of tech, media, journalism and education.
My job title: “Explainer”. I walked around a science museum wearing an orange smock. The museum had no tours, by design. Visitors were encouraged to explore it however they want. Find something that interests you and play with it. There were experiments in vision, sound, physics and biology. If someone had a question about anything, like how to work the experiment, they would ask the people in the orange smocks. The Explainers. Me.
The museum was pioneering a totally new approach to presenting science to kids. An interactive approach. A curiosity-based approach. Back then, almost all other science museums were based on looking at things, not doing things. (A big diorama of dinosaurs, for example.)
The museum become world-famous, perhaps you’ve heard of it. And it became the model for almost all future science museums, including our ScienceCenter here in Ithaca.
It was The Exploratorium in San Francisco.
I had the good fortune, when I worked there, to receive some of my training from its founder. He had actually been a top physicist and nuclear scientist in the 1940s. He had worked on the Manhattan Project. But because of his progressive, left leaning allegiances he was blacklisted in the 1950s from working on nuclear research. So, unable to continue work in his field, he became a high school science teacher. Then, in the 1970s he proposed and got grants to create the Exploratorium.
His name was Frank Oppenheimer. He was the brother of Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of the 2023 film, and he was a side character in the story (Frank provided the Los Alamos location for the Manhattan Project in the film.)
Something he said during my training at The Exploratorium always stuck with me.
Frank felt that the museum was pushing up against a popular view of science as being for the eggheads. Only a brainiac could understand science. It’s not for ordinary people. If you’re not a whiz kid, forget it.
Of course I don’t remember the exact words, but they stuck with me in a very profound way, so I paraphrase what he said during our Explainer training:
“Let’s say a child asks you to explain the scientific principle behind one of the exhibits. And you explain it, and then they say, ‘Oh I get it. It does this because…’ and they get it completely wrong. Do not correct them. Don’t say they’re wrong. Instead, say, ‘Yes! Exactly. You got it!”
“Because it’s more important that they feel they can understand it, that science is understandable, than whether they do or don’t get any particular scientific principle. If they got it wrong, and continue to study science, they’ll learn soon enough what the correct answer is. But they might never get to that point in the future if we don’t help them feel good about understanding science now.”
(In my view this mirrored the shift in advertising that took place in the 1960s, from focusing on product attributes to focusing on feelings about products, a theme of the popular “Mad Men” TV series a few years back.)
The Exploratorium wasn’t about (and still isn’t) a bunch of scientific facts. It’s about the feeling that science is understandable. It’s not just for the eggheads. Science is for everyone.
Technology is applied science, and the media are some of the most powerful and influential ways that technology has been applied to modern life. It’s important that each new generation of kids and teens feel that this is something they can make sense of and participate in. That’s what Ithaca Media Arts is all about. And having fun!
– Cliff Roth, 2023
You can learn more about the history of The Exploratorium here.