Creative Coding: Starting Anew
In 2014 I was looking for a job, and in a way I was looking for myself. I used to work in advertising for some time, until I felt burnt out and couldn’t do my job right. It was a tedious process, until I realized I could no longer do that and moved on to a more technical field. I ended up doing front-end development, a choice that I am really happy I made.
In 2014 I discovered a new field called “creative coding”. It was new to me, as people were doing crazy things in this field for years. From it I went into generative art, and found out that you could create amazing things by coding, things that you would normally do using design tools.
I started to appreciate art, in general, more and more and became really fond of the things you could do with the help of algorithms and computers. I discovered Sol LeWitt’s works, and I was left speechless when I saw what you could create if you had a system in place.
In that same year I started experimenting with glitch art.
I tried to absorb as much information as I could about this creative field, and after a year or so, I created a Facebook group to find like-minded people who might be interested in creative coding. I’ve narrowed it down to projects created with Processing/P5.js. The group took off after some time, and it now has almost 4000 members — 3949 at the time of writing this, to be more exact.
I made a Slack spin-off for the FB group, but it didn’t take off as fast as the original community. At this point, it’s pretty quiet on the Slack group, although there are around 200 members there, but only a handful of them are active. We also held a monthly creative coding collaboration, spawning a lot of creative works, a joint effort that we built through our groups. You can check out the archive over here.
This publication is a continuation of this journey. I would love to see it grow and make it a part of the larger creative coding community. And that can be done only with the help of others who can get involved in writing. I don’t know where it will be heading, but hopefully it will reach a good place.
If you have an article that covers any of these subjects: generative art, creative coding, Processing & P5.js, openFrameworks — or any kind of programming language or library that can be used for creative output — please contact me. Or if you want to collaborate more often, again, drop me a line.
