HELLO WORLD!: The Role of Creative Coding in the Digitized Society
HELLO WORLD! is the first exhibition organized by digital art community Creative Coding Utrecht. The exhibition presents a selection of work and experiments done by the local community of artists, who work with self programmed software and hardware tools to create art and critically investigate the digital technologies that share our reality.
“To what extent can Creative Coding stay ‘critical’ in the ways it ‘makes’? How can artist-programmers continue to push the boundaries of digital technologies in ways that expand our understanding of what technology can do for society?”
Creative Coding refers to a set of software platforms that make programming an accessible skill for contemporary creative practitioners. Through simplified and/or visual programming languages artists, designers can use the full potential of the computer without have a degree in computer science. These platforms are open source which means that the functionality is depended on the user community. Through online documentation and open source code, it becomes easy to start programming and to join the meetups in your area. Creative Coding has become much more than just a practice; it has become a specific branch of maker culture with core values such as inclusivity, Do-It-With-Others and learning by doing crazy experiments.
“Creative coding is about wonder, about exploration, about learning. […] Code gives me a way to play, to explore the odd behavior of our world, to find the systems beneath it all.”
Hello World! is the first program someone writes when learning how to code. It shows the syntax on which a programming language is structured. CCU employs the phrase to present the work and activities of the community of artists, designers and researchers who work with self made software and hardware tools to make art. By engaging with the underlying systems they show the potential of making new expressions, but also how you can employ them in a more critical way to uncover the power and politics that are embedded in data and algorithms that current co-constitute what it means to be human.
Making, Together: Redefining the ‘User’ and ‘Amateur’ in a Community of Makers
The internet is not only the product of the work of particular inventors; it also exists due to the user culture that developed around it. These users, without user guides or professional software, created their own folklore and internet culture. They do not only use new digital technologies for what they’re made for, nor are they always the users for which these technologies are made. Creative Coders redefine how we use technology and for what purpose. They seek to expand our understanding not only of what technologies do, but what they can do. Their mediums and practices range from the use of steel to replicate digitally-modeled sculptures, and the use of wood to create laser-cut algorithmically designed geometric pieces. What seems to bring this interdisciplinary community together is a particular emphasis on experimentation and play. The user has often been seen as a ‘consumer’, but needs to be re-situated as ‘citizen’ and ‘craftsman’. This exhibition aims to ask: How can users regain agency in how they use everyday technologies? In regaining this agency, Creative Coders also reveal the ‘gap’ between what digital technologies state they do (offer us a more efficient and rational view of the world), and what they really do (offer us a distorted perception of reality from the point of view of particular algorithms). Creative coding practices allow this gap to be explored and play with, offering new aesthetics through which to understand and view the world.
‘Critical Making’: Discovering Underlying Processes and Systems
Creative coders desire to uncover the underlying processes and systems of digital technologies, and the ways in which they affect our lives. In this way, Creative Coding extends upon ‘critical making’ practices which aim to find unconventional or subversive uses of digital technologies. However, this approach to digital technologies has allowed not only for artists to subvert, intervene and co-opt corporate uses of digital technologies, but has also allowed further innovation to take place within the commercial sector, as it feeds on these new ideas. To what extent, then, can Creative Coding stay ‘critical’ in the ways it ‘makes’? How can artist-programmers continue to push the boundaries of digital technologies in ways that expand our understanding of what technology can do for society? This exhibition aims to look into the making practices of Creative Coding — and its politics — in detail in order to understand the creative process, and the ways in which aesthetics are inextricably linked with political issues in contemporary society. Creating through coding showcases that creativity is not a faculty through which artists make ‘ready-made’ artworks, but rather a never-ending experimental, generative, and iterative process.
Artistic Agency: Experimenting with Control and Randomness
Creative Coding practices often involve both control and randomness. Artist-programmers describe the ways in which glitches, false categorizations, but also the technology’s own limitations create inputs or outputs. Their work is often an iterative process of refining the algorithms and machines that they work with in order to get a desired result. A process of translation often takes place, in which the artist must make their work machine-readable, and vice versa. The ‘art object’, within the Creative Coding field, is therefore not only composed of the physical or virtual product, but also the algorithmic processes that are constantly refined to render the work more meaningful and effective. Creative coding showcases the ways in which ‘knowing’ and ‘making’ are the outcome of both asymmetric and symmetric logic, and the ways in which human consciousness has always depended on, but also always sought ways to surmount, the very structures of society.
These three themes were explored throughout the exhibition, and were used to start conversations about what it means to be an active citizen in the digitized world of today. It also investigated what creative coding means to different practitioners coming from the fields of design, physics, visual art, and programming, and expanding our understanding of its practices. Creative coding, when exhibited as a diverse and experimental field, can begin to be thought of as a critical practice and community through which we can begin to understand our digitized society, and in what novel ways we can begin to engage with it.
Acknowledgements & the HELLO WORLD! team
The Hello World! exhibition was made possible with the support of: Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, K.F. Hein Fonds, Lemonaid ChariTea, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, Gemeente Utrecht, VSBfonds, Sensor Lab,, House of Pint, Plat4mation.
Fabian van Sluijs — founder & curator
Axelle van Wynsberghe — researcher & co-curator cabinet of curiosities
Costanza Tagliaferri — assistant researcher
Bram Snijders — technical producer
Iris Jansen — producer
Tanja van Zoest — communication coordinator
Benjamin van Vliet — pr advisor & editor
Sietse van der Meer — social media manager
Carolien Teunisse — co-founder and producer
