Dan Shiffman - Codeland - Creative Coding: An art and code showcase - NYC 2017

created building let's get a warm welcome okay this is me now first oh thank you sir on I just like looking at all these beautiful amazing faces I can tell if reading this is like what my favorite conferences ever if not the favorite so thank you all thank you for having me thanks to all of you for being here I'm going to also talk about making arts with code and what I'm going to do is actually just show you a range of projects of things that other people have made that inspire me and you know one of the things that's really solidifying in my head after listening to Stephanie's talk is that each project really has a story to it so I'm going to give you a taste of a whole bunch of projects you won't get that full story but I really want you to think about the story behind these projects and maybe you'll dive deeper into in defining stuff stuff about them so I should say first of all that I am I'm not an artist although I also might want to say that everybody is an artist but then that means maybe everybody except for me I don't know anyway something like that but I did actually learn to code through making art projects so these are two projects that I made the one on the left over here is something that I made in 2002 which I think like I was losing my calculator earlier I sparingly like fifteen years ago but um this is a project called swarm which paints a uses a little flocking simulation to paint a portrait of the viewer and on the right over there is a experiment where I took the film Run Lola Run and played it on this large a video wall that's actually in the IFC building on 18th Street on the West Side Highway in lots of little tiny squares all at slightly different moments of time so I one of the ways that I learned to code was actually through making art and I think that's one way to think about learning new skills finding yourself into a job if that's your goal and so but now where I really spend all my time is at a place called ITP ITP is a two-year master's program at Tisch School of the Arts red burns who's one of us she is uh she was an inspiration and a mentor of mine quote from her said I'm not sure if I made up but if I did it really is something that she would have said she said this I I definitely said this she has actually have a book of red burns quotes that it's really wonderful but technology is a means to an end and that and its people so that is also I think a really important theme in the work that I do at ITP in teaching in making open source tools that you know what's the reason for this technology stuff it's because hey we're people in human beings and there's this thing called the human condition and communication and so really to think about the humanity and the work that we're doing is important another project that I work a lot on is something called the processing foundation which is a not-for-profit organization we maintain a few different open-source tools for learning to code for making creative projects with code for making art with code and beyond that and actually just to give a little plug tomorrow one of the workshops is a Kathy Park Asians workshop she is a developer of a new web editor for p5.js which is a JavaScript framework for creative coding and making visual animated projects in the browser she's doing a workshop on p5.js I also somebody else put this slide in here not me but I also have this YouTube channel but it's actually not called coding rainbow but I just I had these eyes I couldn't delete this from some earlier presentation but you know it's I love reading rainbows like the greatest thing ever for me growing up and so I'm so inspired by it but you know it's a little bit problematic too I don't know if you guys know this to make a logo that looks really similar to something else should not do that and so now my youtube channel it was really an homage it's called coding train so one of the things that I do on the YouTube channel is make video tutorials about a variety of different topics a lot of which can lead people to be creative and express themselves with code so I you know I guess whoops I went the wrong way see I my my fingers are like they want to show that slide too much okay so why why make art with code so first of all I wanted to just mention that this is National Poetry Month I know this is a code land conference and you might think that it's code related to poetry but there is there is poetry and code perhaps there's code in poetry this is one of my I will read this poem to you right now you know I do only take in five minutes so far so I might actually have the time but I'll just read you the last two lines it's called the summer day by Mary Oliver tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life so I think thinking about the poetry and language and expression is something that you can do with co2 and one of the things that allows you to I don't actually really have this experience but I imagine a lot of times when you're programming you have to and especially the times with an open source project that I might be working on you kind of have this spec sheet and this word a list of goals and this thing's this thing that you're supposed to do and get to the finish line and then you have to do this like thing called a unit test or I don't know what that is something like that but what making art with code can really allow you to do is just be playful to allow yourself to make something useless and maybe that thing that's useless will actually turn into something really useful collaboration is wonderful stream-of-consciousness coding what happens with you start to program but you don't know where you're going I think is a wonderful thing and just discovering the beauty the poetry in an algorithm itself so these are themes that you can think about and I think if you think back again to Stephanie's presentation a lot of these kind of themes are present they are in the process of the story but for the projects I want to show you today anyway I want to ask ask you to forget about the code although probably I can't help but mention technical aspects and I think what's important is to really think about the artists and the story of what inspired the work so something that I did for today is I took a bunch of projects some of which are people who sent me things they made who are maybe viewers of youtube channel I picked a bunch of projects that are made with processing that are sort of in the if you go to the processing website there's an exhibition page with things that are made with those tools and I also took some pieces that are made by students at ITP the program where I teach and I ask them all just to tell me a little bit about themselves and what inspired their work and I should also mention that some of the pieces the one from ITP are on display in the hallway out here so you'll be able to see some of them afterwards okay so the first one that I want to show you apologies for Jacobs last name being cut off there is by Jacob Foster so Jacob is a developer and artist and he writes this project was inspired by dystopian future imagery depicted in apocalyptic movies and video games okay so this is a this is actually something so what I'm starting with is actually simple you'll experiment that this both of this project the next one are both available you can see them on code pen so they're just JavaScript HTML demos ideas this is called corrupted grungy retro text and CRT effect by Alka if you're wondering by the way I have a slide at the end that has a URL for every single one of these projects and that'll be available after the conference as well when the slides are published so okay so so the next piece I want to show you is by Ada Lovecraft ADA rights that she is a senior creative technologist and algorithmic psychonaut and she writes have always been fascinated by smoke patterns in relatively still air the first time it worked I was mesmerised and I still find it absolutely enthralling every time I watch it so this is also a piece that is called smoke it is available on code pen what this I think is really exemplifies this idea of discovering the beauty of an algorithm this uses a particular kind of random number generation called noise or purling noise a name for Ken Perlin who's a computer science professor actually also at NYU and by just sort of visualizing the algorithm and looking at the results a 8su created this beautiful project that runs just right there in the browser so one of the things that I see people do also with so what I started with there are two projects that kind of are just simple experiments visual experiments right there in your web browser you can look at the code you can run them but something else you can really start to think about is what happens when you take code and algorithms and put those things into the real world into the physical world so this is Mary Huang who was actually a UX designer at oculus and her inspiration about from about her worker project is called continued continuum if she wanted to make a computational fashion collection and it seemed fitting to use the theme of the little black dress as a unifying constraint so that's her wearing a dress that was designed through a software system that she built and I'm going to show you that right now so this is a video and what it's showing you is that a user is collaborating with her software drawing shapes over the human form the software is interpreting those gestures making polygons out of them creating shapes and then you can see on the right a sort of visualization of what the acts dress would look like so this is one thing I think is really interesting about this project also is that we often think of this dichotomy of oh I'm a painter and I'm going to paint something and it's coming from my mind in my hands or I'm a programmer and I'm going to write an algorithm that's going to generate something visual and here we could see the sort of beauty of kind of human-computer collaboration so the artist is really collaborating with the piece of software there's hand drawn gestures but an algorithm which turns that into 3d form and it's one of my favorite kind of pieces of really something unexpected that I wouldn't have expected and this is made with processing the next artist that I want to show you her name is Lea she is an artist and teacher and also a food blogger at vegetarian 80 and so Lea has done something really amazing a lot of you might be familiar with the idea of 3d printing and you could imagine writing an algorithm to generate a 3d form and 3d printed or having a 3d model but what Lea did is she wanted to see what could be done with a 3d printer by extruding filament at a certain rate and moving in different directions at a certain speed rather than just output a ready-made 3d model so what happens if you kind of use a 3d printer for what it's not meant to be used for and the results you'll see are really quite beautiful so this is called filament sculptures by Lea I'm going to just let this play for a little bit as some beautiful music as well [Music] [Music] [Music] so this this video is several minutes long at the end there's a link to her website where you can go and watch the whole thing it's amazing to me the sheer amount of kind of beauty and variety that she was able to get just from writing algorithm writing code to control the 3d printer and I you know these are just a bead when I first saw this I just was kind of amazed and it wakened a part of my imagination that I just couldn't ever believe that if this came out of a 3d printer for based on how I understood 3d printers to work I'm moving on now to showing you some works that you might sort of think of as a motion graphics pieces so I look at some sort of like in the browser artworks some physical manifestations a dress a 3d print ceedric Kiefer is an artist and designer from Berlin its co-founder of a studio called informative which is studio that focuses on digital art and design in different media and so he writes about this piece that I'm going to show you called unnamed sound sculpture our main intention besides the collaborative nature of the project was to break out of our usual workflow and comfort zone to use new technology and software tools in combinations with disciplines from different fields to achieve new visual aesthetics and this is really where I think the magic of collaboration comes in what happens when you collaborate in this case with dancer and so this is a piece called unnamed sound sculpture I'm going to let the video play in a moment but what's going on here is watch on screen let it play let it speak for itself I think for a minute so you know I asked you to forget about the code and so I'm really trying to stay true to my let the technology melt away sort of point of view right now but I think one of the things that's wonderful about this piece is the use of the Microsoft Kinect so typically what's happening here is the dancers body is tracked and you know what you might think you need is an elaborate expensive motion capture system to do this but because of the abstract nature of the visualization you know a simple simpler piece of technology the Kinect that can track a view of the human form and look at what Barry's parts of the body are doing and receive that data into a computer program and re visualize that it's possible and I think this is a sort of beautiful example of this kind of simplicity and elegance of just taking human motion and reinterpreting that through an algorithm through code the next piece that I want to show you is by Assisi Lou and she writes she's an artist now based in Brooklyn I'm making art in the intersection between drawing and algorithms handcrafting and computation rules and randomness and for her art is a bridge between connecting insight and reality to interface between man and machine code is logical art is emotional so cci the her project is called a random walk or dripping and actually I'm very excited to show this to you because it really takes I'm not saying that anything that she did is really related to what I did but you'll see the connection between this piece that I made 15 years ago and what she how she's done something similar at Anna and taken it to great new heights so what so this is her piece it's an interactive video installation when a viewer comes and stands in front of the portrait it paints their portrait and it uses a variety of different techniques a random walk is something that's an algorithm for something that makes random decisions it moves about through a 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional space and even just with something as simple as that and using the color of pixels she's really created quite a beautiful and meditative experience okay the next piece I want to show you is by Lindsey Daniels this piece I believe is on display here she is a paper artist a perpetual student and maker of things ceci as an alum of ITP and Lindsey is a current student and Lindsey I guess in class asked this question the question came up in a discussion our books interactive and she wanted to she writes I wanted to challenge the idea that they aren't pop-up books are already interactive all on their own so what if they could also immerse you in a setting of their own making so what Lindsey has created is a pop-up book that has interactive components that communicate with a screen digital display and tell the story expand on the story that's in the book I will show you a brief little video of this so you can see her manipulating the pages of the book and as she touches different pieces of it the story plays out for you on the screen you can see this little cute little fox enters in the page as she touches a part of the piece the next project I want to show you is by Juan Chen also on display here one is a former bank employee she's a current designer and a future artist I would say she's a current artist for sure I want back there and so she writes what if there were other creatures using smartphones just like us today are we that into what happens if we become the things that are being captured and you're gonna this is one of the wonderful piece called the audience's where these tiny little creatures suddenly watch you with their phones so I'm going to talk about the ITP shoe show this is from the ITP winter show and I'm going to talk about the show in a minute as I wrap up here so the last piece I have for you is by a hailey Wang this is also on display here she is a student at ITP previously a designer and an IT company that focused mostly on interactive installations in prototype and she writes she was inspired by watching the powers of 10 video and also the elevator from Charlie in the Chocolate Factory I wanted to make an elevator experience of traveling inside and outside of the earth and I was curious to discover what people could see and experience and well I guess I didn't mention this I really moved here into these last three projects the pop-up book this the audiences and this piece is you know if you think all the way back to the first pieces I saw you that are just these JavaScript experiments whose visual art pieces that happen in the browser what happens when you take those interactive animated experiences and embed them into a physical installation and this is a really beautiful wonderful example of that so this is called 1240 leagues of Earth and I will let you experience it a little bit in this video [Music] [Music] you so um so if you're interested in one thing I just want to mention we're interested in seeing more pieces like this both of the all those those last three pieces work from the ITP winter show which is a show of all the students work at the end of the semester and we have one up and coming this Tuesday May 16th and when they May 17th it's 721 Broadway downtown and that's the URL up there I encourage you it's open to the public please come I'll be there say hi to me say I had me today hey I'm here right now I think it's my myelogram pretty sure but and so and also key so here are all the projects and the URLs on this whoops that's my own personal primer ah I forgot that I was going to make a noise okay so these are all the projects in all the URLs and that encourage you to take a look for those and I want to make one last plug also for something that's very important which is the National Endowment for the Arts and when I was emailing with Jax de Luca who's a director there and sort of media new media projects who wrote to me and said hey remind everybody that creative coders are artists coders are artists and so the National Endowment for the Arts has a current the current set of grants you can apply for that's the URL right there and also I would like to also say it's something that we as a community need to support especially in today's day and age and so to show support for the NEA you can also go to Americans for the Arts org so thank you very much for having me I hope you were inspired by some of these projects I hope you will go talk to some of the artists who are here and showing their work and find out more about their stories and I look forward to the rest of this wonderful beautiful day at this conference thanks everybody thank you

Channel: CodeNewbie

Views: 36,723

Rating: 4.969646 out of 5

Keywords: tech conference, art, code, coding, learning to code, javascript

Id: 68JUaszsvmU

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017