CC Fest is a free and friendly event for anyone curious about creative code! Will you join us?
On Saturday, March 25, 2023, from 12 to 3 pm EST (-4 UTC) join us on Zoom for a virtual creative coding fest. We’ll make interactive and engaging digital art, animation, and games, work with AI or hardware, and explore other options in various workshops. Hear from our keynote speakers, Rachel Uwa and Neema Githere, on important and timely topics related to creative coding!
We welcome:
Students, artists, hobbyists, creatives, and tinkerers who are curious to learn
Educators and community organizers who are looking for inspiration
Everyone who would like to learn more about creative code and our community
Virtual CC Fest - March 25, 2023, is organized by Saber Khan, Senior Director of Outreach and Partnerships at Processing Foundation, and Marie Claire Flanagan with support from Suhyun (Sonia) Choi, Raphaël de Courville, and Tsige Tafesse. To attend please register here or below. If you have any questions you can email ccfest@processing.org.
Schedule (all times EDT -4 UTC)
12:00 pm - Welcome and opening keynote from Neema Githere
12:45 pm - Invited sessions (more details below)
1:45 pm - Break
2:00 pm - Community sessions (more details below)
2:30 pm - Closing keynote from Rachel Uwa and goodbye
Keynotes
is an artist, educator, and organizer with a background in audio engineering and vfx compositing. Over the past 15+ years, she’s lived in and organized social justice and tech communities and events big and small. Rachel's biggest desire is to see people living the lives they dream of living rather than the ones they should. Her latest creative project: an art/tech zine called ¡MEOW!
is an artist and guerrilla theorist based in the #digitaldiaspora whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Working primarily as a writer/theorist, artist, and curator, her work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Having traveled to over 20 countries researching Afrodiasporic digital cultural production, she has developed a commitment to cultural work that defies and transcends borders.
Flier designed by Joo Park
Invited Sessions (60 minutes)
Metaphors & Machines: How do the words we use to describe Machine Learning affect our relationship with technology? with Aarati Akkapeddi
Session Description: In this workshop/round table we will think together about the different metaphors we use for Machine Learning and AI. We will think about how language reflects and shapes our relationship with technology. I will briefly share my experience creating a machine-learning model with my family photographs and how my relationship to this model can be viewed using different metaphors. We will write our metaphors and discuss them together as a group. Participants will leave with a collaborative document with notes from the discussion and further readings/listenings. This workshop is inspired by Maya Ganesh's paper Between metaphor and meaning: AI and being human.
Biography: I am a Telugu-American cross-disciplinary artist, coder and educator based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). I often use family and archival photographs as source material, combining code-based and analog techniques (such as photography & printmaking) to create artwork about intergenerational/collective memory. My creative work has been supported by institutions such as Ada X, The Photographers' Gallery, ETOPIA Center for Art & Technology, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and LES Printshop. I currently work as a designer/developer for The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network where I create digital spaces and tools.
Understanding, Transforming, and Preserving Movement in Digital Spaces with LaJune McMillian
Session Description: Understanding, Transforming, and Preserving Movement in Digital Spaces is a workshop to learn about Extended Reality tools in relationship to race, gender, and culture. This workshop explores issues of cultural representation and exploitation through readings and discussions while also providing an introduction to motion capture, rigging and 3D environments. Core elements of the workshop integrate performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question access, control and representation.
Biography: LaJuné is a Multidisciplinary Artist, and Educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our contemporary forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. LaJune believes in making by diving into, navigating, critiquing, and breaking systems and technologies that uphold systemic injustices to decommodify our bodies, undo our indoctrination, and make room for different ways of being. LaJuné has had the opportunity to show and speak about their work at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, Tribeca Film Festival, Times Square, and Art & Code's Weird Reality. LaJuné was previously the Director of Skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and Figure Skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology. They have continued their research on Blackness, movement, and technology during residencies and fellowships at the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, NYU ITP, Barbarian Group, and Barnard College.
Ambient sites & sights with Chia Amisola
Session Description: What sound does a website make? Most websites we encounter overwhelm us with demands for attention; what if we could dwell on the internet in more passive, meditative ways? In this session, we will explore and create ambient websites that consider how our computers can make use of generative art, sound, and data for poetic ways of expression with HTML/CSS, Javascript, and p5.js – no programming experience is required. In gathering to make these ‘screensaver’ websites, we’ll also consider the nature of visibility and presence on the web: how the tools we use may hide or reveal infrastructure, the handmade qualities of our websites as vessels, and how we can codify new languages and signals for being that are more quiet, tender, and loving.
Biography: Chia Amisola (they/them) is an internet / ambient artist. Their (web)site-specific art explores web worldmaking to construct spaces, systems, and tools imagining a world where creation is synonymous with liberation. They are a Filipino tech worker, the Founder of Developh, a community of practice towards critical technology based in Manila, Philippines since 2016, and are the Steward & Archivist of the Philippine Internet Archive. Their work uses strategies of defaults, compression, and infrastructure-building to explore the politics of ambiences & visibilities and poetic reclamations of technology in its love, labor, and liberty.
10 ways to shape your shapes with Aleksandra Jovanić
Session Description: Let’s set aside ellipses, arcs, and simple rounded shapes for the time being, and dive into various ways to construct and deconstruct curvy lines. We’ll use some trigonometry and math to make our lives easier, and make the most out of curves and Beziers. Tangents, in the story and on the shapes, are expected.
Biography: Aleksandra Jovanic is an artist and programmer from Belgrade, Serbia, who holds a PhD in digital arts and a BSc in computer science. In her research and artistic practice she combines various media, mainly in the field of interactive art, art games, and generative art. Recent works focus on the aesthetics of data visualizations and optical illusions, as well as explorations of accepted concepts of truth and reality. As an assistant professor, she teaches at the new media department at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade.
How To Draw a Line with Dave Pagurek
Session Description: How does one add character to the stock vector line? In this session, work towards some techniques you can use to add more expression to your lines in p5, live coding our way through the math and geometry of lines to adding texture in shaders.
Biography: Dave (he/him) is a computer graphics programmer in Toronto, Canada, who helps develop the WebGL mode of p5js. In his spare time, Dave enjoys leaving geometry problems on his friends' whiteboards for them to solve.
Community Sessions (30 minutes)
Creative Machine: Your Friendly Machine Learning Library for Processing with Jeongin Lee
Session Description: In this session, you’ll learn how to use Machine Learning and build interactive Machine Learning applications with a few lines of code in Processing. We will use Creative Machine, a Machine Learning library for Processing that supports multiple Machine Learning models for object detection, face, and pose detection, sentiment analysis, etc. By the end of this session, you will develop your interactive ML application in Processing.
Biography: Jeongin Lee is a junior at NYU Abu Dhabi, studying Computer Science with minors in Interactive Media and Mathematics. Jeongin is a technologist, creative coder, and full-stack web developer interested in the intersection of technology and art. She is passionate about Open Source and making software effective and user-friendly for everyone. Outside of her school work, she loves making art with code, visiting museums, and traveling.
Writing p5 sketches declaratively with p5-marker with Caleb Foss
Session Description: p5-marker is a wrapper for p5.js that allows users to create sketches declaratively using HTML elements. The tools is designed to focus on what the creator wants to see, rather than the steps to produce it. Features include a new way to integrate screen-reader accessible text descriptions into sketch code, live variable values in browsers’ inspector developer tool, and built-in 2D collision detection using Ben Moren’s p5.collide2D library. This session will demonstrate these features and introduce how to get started with p5-marker.
Biography: Caleb Foss (they/them) is an artist who explores power dynamics embedded in familiar media technologies. They make games, apps, videos, digitally-fabricated objects, and multimedia performances. Foss' methods draw from amusement parks and magic tricks. They earned their BFA in Film at SUNY Purchase and their MFA in New Media Arts at University of Illinois at Chicago. Foss' work has been showcased in film festivals including Chicago Underground, Imagine Science (Brooklyn), and FRACTO (Berlin) as well as Hand Eye Society's WordPlay Festival for writing in games (Toronto). They are a Co-Chair of the Game Design program at DePaul University, Chicago.
Links: Github
Beats and Peaks: Audio Visualization with p5.Sound Library with Liam Baum
Session Description: This session will look at how to create and manipulate visualization of audio files to produce interesting sonic and visual results using the p5.sound library.
Biography: Liam Baum is a musician, educator and creative coding enthusiast. He teaches music at a public middle school in Bayside Queens. He recently obtained his NYS certification for K-12 Computer Science Education from Hunter College. He has lost count of how many CCFests he has attended but has lead workshops about Coding Music with Sonic PI, Music & AI, p5 Sound Library and Physical Computing and attended workshops about Web Sockets, Colors, Coding Visuals in Hydra and Data Visualization.
Easier GIF sharing with Jesús Rascón
Session Description: Long gone are the days in which one needs to save all the individual frames of an animation just to share a WIP on Twitter or Mastodon. Introducing native gif rendering in your sketch! And a little overview on how it works.
Biography: Mainly an artist, but make it digital. Webdev, design, animation, music and math!
Exploring Gestures of Care with Posenet with Jules Kris
Session Description: In our relationships, we use nonverbal gestures to communicate love, appreciation, apologies, and other complex feelings. We might make a loved one a surprise breakfast, water their plants, send them a postcard, or come up with a secret handshake. In this workshop, we’ll explore these gestures of care with Posenet and p5.js.
Biography: Jules Kris (he/they) is a media artist, game maker, and creative technologist who uses software “incorrectly” to invent alternative interfaces for their body when mainstream technologies fail them. He can be found co-organizing events with Tiny Tech Zines and cooking comically large pots of soup for friends.
Links: Instagram
Shared Body: Designing Open Residencies with cy x
Session Description: In 2022, Cy launched "Water as Technology Open Residencies," as an experiment in collective engagement, open source knowledge, and creative technology exploration. This workshop will talk through a potential format that others may be able to use to start open residencies in communities all over.
Biography: cy x (they/we) is a cyber witch doing the magical work of integrating indigenous, ancestral, and emerging technologies, that show the necessity of an embodied way of being that moves beyond binaries and reliance on techno-capitalist fixes. Fusing art and technology with the practice of witchcraft, they use spells, rituals, and alchemic practices to fundamentally alter the world around us.
Links: Instagram
Ideas for data science education with Atilio Barreda
Session Description: This workshop will explore various methods to visualize data science and machine learning concepts using p5.js and ml5.js. By incorporating animation and interactivity, we aim to simplify complex techniques and make them more accessible to a wider audience. We will also go over user interface design considerations and demonstrate how to integrate ml5.js for data analysis and transformation with p5.js to create accessible, informative visualizations.
Biography: I'm Atilio Barreda II, a data visualization engineer with experience in JavaScript, Python, and data analysis tools. I'm currently pursuing a Master's degree in Data Analysis and Visualization at CUNY Graduate Center. In my previous roles, I've helped develop APIs, migrate and visualize data, and deploy web applications. I also teach data science courses as an adjunct lecturer at the New York City College of Technology. I'm passionate about using data to drive social change. I was recently involved with the Math & Data Justice Collaborative, where I worked on data visualization and web engineering for non-profit organizations. I am a software engineer and data science educator. I am interested in creating civic technology for everyone.
Links: Twitter