Processing Day Bangalore 2019

https://processingindia.org/bangalore.html

Organizers : Karthik Dondeti, Mathura Govindarajan, Rushali Paratey (in association with Srishti SIGCHI chapter)

Feb 2nd 2019 | 10:00 am — 6 pm

Venue — Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology

Processing Community Day Bangalore started as an attempt to find a community in India that is interested in creative coding and experimenting with code to make art. These shared interests brought the organizers together and led us to not just organize the event in Bangalore but also actively participate in building the creative coding community in India ever since.

Lets run PCD in Bangalore!

We are three people from Bangalore and Bombay and passionate about open source tools who were introduced to each other through Xin, the PCD 2019 Worldwide organiser.

Our aim behind this event was to create a community, introduce creative coding, and also encourage people to showcase their work in a supportive environment.

We hoped to do this through a series of lightning talks, project showcases, open forum and workshops surrounding creative coding tools and libraries such as Processing and p5.js.

Thats cool, but what now?

Given that this event was the first time we were organising a large community event, there were quite a few questions we were trying to answer for ourselves. We had decided that we wanted this event to be free, but this only raised more questions — such as — how do we promote this? Where will the event run? Who will provide food?

But of course the community that we met along the way helped us through and through

We were introduced to the SIGCHI student chapter through Bangalore’s own data viz superhero — Rasagy Sharma. Once we were in touch with them — we suddenly had an army of enthusiastic volunteers who were ready to help us for the big day with human power, logistics and more! A huge thanks to Pranjal Jain who helped us coordinate this event with his peers at Srishti. We also had a ton of help with people on social media who helped us spread the word about PCD bangalore

A huge shoutout to Dan Shiffman, Lauren Mccarthy and Cassie Tarkajian — who even though couldn’t be a part of PCD Bangalore, were part of our promotional video that really helped us both communicate the intent behind PCD and reach out to a larger audience.

Going back to the fact that we wanted this to be an inclusive event, we spent a lot of our efforts in ensuring that we could get the word out to a large group of people — students, hobbyists, educators, professionals. This was to ensure that we had a wide audience but also a wider variety of talks.

D-day!

We kicked off the day with the video below that spoke about the importance and significance of creative coding in India

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI72Hiig4yE

After this we started with our first set of talks that spoke about various ways one could use creative coding, and also of how one could really enter the field, and operate in the space

Mithru Vigneshwara presenting his talk “Beyond the Screen”

Tanvi Kumar presenting her talk “Stepping into the world of software through open source”

Hardik Chandrahas presenting his talk “Storytelling through creative coding”

Arjit Kapoor presenting his talk “Generative art and its principals”

Lindsey Daniels presenting her talk “Empowering the self through code and technology”

This was followed by some extremely enthusiastic workshops that was interjected with lunch

We had a fair number of beginners whom we could see shine in the workshops as they got a chance to experiment with fun softwares such as p5.js, Processing and ml5.

• Rasagy Sharma — An Intro to Data Art — Bring your name, take back art!
• Rushali Paratey & Mathura Govindarajan — Introduction to ml5
• Dominic Barrett — Using p5sound for musical performance and soundart
• Future Fiction & Mathura Govindarajan- Generative Futures: An Introduction to concepts of Processing through visual composition

Participants in the “Intro to Data Art” workshop making examples of data viz on paper

Participants in the “ Generative Futures” workshop working on their laptops

After lunch, we had our last set of talks for the day. This set was even more diverse than the last as we spoke about how AI can use art, and about how humans can use art to empower themselves.

Ashris Choudhury presenting his talk “Networks — making the invisible visible with p5js”

Usha Mohanraj presenting her talk “Anyone Can Code: Learning to code at 50”

Utsav Chadha presenting his talk “Existentialism + Software”

Samarth Gulati presenting his talk “Making a case for Generative Art”

Harshit Agrawal presenting his talk “Artificial Intelligence and Art”

Rasagy Sharma also set up a Data based selfie installation — inspired by Giorgia Lupi’s similar project for TED — that by the end of the day gave us a lovely glance about the participants and where they came from!

A group picture of the participants of PCD Bangalore — group of people in the center are holding the “Data Selfie” installation

All in all

Throughout the day we had a wide range of audiences — from the student, hobby and professional communities, everyone with a unique view and perspective to share about creative coding and how it has changed things for them.

The best part of the day was that we were able to create a forum for so many people to share their views, thoughts and experiences. We started off this plan with 3 of us wondering if we could get a tiny group of 10 people together — to having close to 120 participants through the day. We can’t wait to see what PCD 2020 holds and how we can create a larger and much more inclusive community!

So long and thanks for all the fish

A huge thanks to Karthik Dondeti, Rushali Paratey, Rasagya Sharma and Saber Khan for helping with the article. An additional shout out to Rasagy for providing all the pictures!