A Workshop on Creative Coding for New Media

Undergraduate / Graduate

This project-based, workshop-style course will offer a close look at how we can be creative with code at a crucial moment in the always-shifting relationships between computation, creativity, material, and audience. En route, we'll examine a dizzying array of contemporary creative-coding environments in both production and live performance, explore historical dead-ends, half-baked visions, long-forgotten programming languages, as well as yet-to-emerge interfaces and altogether imaginary futures. And we'll draw on examples from new media, music and sound art, cinema and VR, computer games, architecture and CAD/CAM. Our work together will be done in the context of extending and reworking Field --- an open-source environment for creative coding developed for use in a teaching role here at UChicago. As the barriers between making things with computers and consuming content served up by them grow, we'll step into today's computational surplus and reclaim some viable space for creation.