Kofi Oduro, a Montreal-based creative coder known as Illestpreacha, has kept a daily creative practice for almost seven years and has presented at CC Fest several times. The session grew out of work he did for recreational therapy. His starting point was that we live surrounded by inputs from social media and daily life, yet rarely notice that our senses, including smell, texture and temperature, are how we make sense of the world. He wanted participants to bring that awareness into code.
He began with “coding in your head.” Participants named their fifth favorite color and seventh favorite meal, then merged the two. The chat filled with combinations such as polka dot peanut butter and jelly, white loaded nachos, red fried noodles and pink rice with chicken kebab. He then asked about texture and sound: are you crunchy, velvety, soggy? Would you hurt someone who stepped on you? These were questions, he noted, that an AI could not answer for you, because each person makes their own associations. Later he searched for a “fifth favorite meal” and showed that the generated answer fell back on the most common foods.
Next he turned those imagined dishes loose in live code. In Hydra, a few lines pixelated his webcam feed and ran it through a colorama effect, and he asked participants how their dish would move through the room, where it would land and how it would smell. As he shifted hues, participants described the image as fresh and citrusy, then icy like Montreal, then like plankton when he tiled his face 100 and then 225 times. Live Code Lab added a bouncing shape and simple sounds, and LocoMotion, a live coding language with motion-captured 3D dancers (and raccoons), showed how lighting and movement can push a scene toward a genre. A Halloween piece combining Sonic Pi, LocoMotion and Hydra showed how texture, motion and sound can create a mood without anything literally frightening on screen. Participants also offered the third song they would play on a rainy day, which he wove into an interactive fiction demo in Twine.
Asked about his process, he described a daily practice where a minute counts as much as an hour, weekly prompts and challenges for inspiration, sharing work in progress, and treating failure as part of the work. He urged adults to play more and to join more than one community, because people are eager to share what they love.
Three takeaways
- Code in your head first. Combining unusual prompts gives each person associations no tool can supply (00:06:33–00:11:39).
- Short code can be expressive. Two or three lines of Hydra turned a webcam into a shared sensory experience (00:13:03–00:22:07).
- Consistency can be small. A daily practice where one minute counts, fed by prompts and communities, keeps ideas moving (00:49:11–00:55:00).
Try it
From the workshop: write down your fifth favorite color and seventh favorite meal, merge them into one thing, and describe its texture, sound and smell. Then open Hydra, start from the camera, and change colors and repetition until the screen feels like your description.
Watch and explore
Replay: Watch on YouTube
- Hydra
- Live Code Lab
- LocoMotion
- Twine
- Halloween piece with Sonic Pi, LocoMotion and Hydra (YouTube)
- Numerical Intentions and Shrinking on itch.io
From the original program
Published before the event
Improv Digitally, Sensorial and with Self Awareness
What if Code was treated as a way to journal?
As a way to translate the meaning of the world as seen through your senses?
When you have a thought, you see how it can be viewed through different perspectives?
An Improv, freestyle and/or Unplanned voyage into the moment, season you are weathering at that point in time?
Improv, Digitally, Sensorial and with Self Awareness demonstrates how code can be thought beyond the concept of algorithm and technology but also a communication style that can be unique to one self.
About the presenters
Kofi Oduro (Illestpreacha)
He/Him
Kofi Oduro (Illestpreacha) is an award winning Experiential Storyteller, Creative Coder & Data Practitioner that transforms sounds, images, data, words & code into experiences that nurtures discussion, reflection & interaction. He creates, designs and research through his decade plus involvement in performance and event production.
By combining his sports & health background with technology, computational skill set and a multi-sensorial approach to design, his creative practice is an observation of the world around us that he puts into artworks & experiences for others to relate to or disagree with. Through Videography, Poetry and Creative Coding, He tries to highlight the realms of human performance and the human mind in different scenarios. These situations can be described as social, internal, or even biological, which we face in our everyday lives.