Creative coding

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Definition

Creative coding is a type of computer programming in which the goal is to create something expressive instead of something functional.1

  • live visuals and for VJing
  • creating visual art and design
  • entertainment
  • art installations
  • projections and projection mapping
  • sound art
  • advertising
  • product prototypes

In education

There are strong indications that a creative approach in programming allows to pay attention to institutional and social requirements concerning computer science education. This includes the students’ interest and motivation as well as their performance and knowledge acquisition. 2

Fractals and creative coding

Creative Computing is about using computers in ways that nobody has ever thought of before. It is desirable that Creative Computing can be done by computing itself. 3

Live coding

The implications of liveness are taken to an extreme in the practice of live-coding, where artists write code as a means of performance, with an audience experiencing the output of the program at the same time as viewing a large-screen projection of the continuously modified program code. Predominantly, live-coding is used in musical performance, but visual or audiovisual performances are not uncommon 4.

Creative coding credibility

The assessment of creative coding is challenging in the credibility due to aesthetic reason. It also suffers from manual workload for the large number of enrollments in open online courses. We propose an online open up-vote assessment to tangle the above challenges. 5

Creating a programming environment

A different approach to creative coding interface - project Stamper6.

Multiplicitous media artworks

Interesting questions (2020)7

  • What programming languages, coding tools, authoring tools and design patterns support creative multiplicitous media?
  • What creative paradigms, workflows and ecosystems of practitioners best support creative multiplicitous media, and what are the emerging trends in creative multiplicitous media practice?
  • Examples of multiplicitous media systems that are adaptive to site specific contexts or different applications.
  • What are the pain points in creative multiplicitous media and how can they be mitigated or removed?
  • What is the ‘winning paradigm’ for flexible and reusable hardware configuration that makes it easy for beginners to get started and for professionals to easily hack and reconfigure systems for their needs?
  • How can simulation tools and smart adaptive systems support the creation of multiplicitous media artworks?
  • What are the emerging application areas and affordances of multiplicitous media artworks and how are these impacting other areas such as the design of interactive media experiences in galleries and museums or outdoor public artworks?
  • How can multiplicitous media work minimise its environmental impact?

Project classification in ACM CCS

About CCS.

  • Applied computing
    • Arts and humanities
  • Human-centered computing
    • Human computer interaction (HCI)
    • Visualization
    • Interaction design

  1. Wikipedia contributors, "Creative coding," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, (accessed September 13, 2021) link ↩︎

  2. V. Fragapane and B. Standl, ("Work in Progress: Creative Coding and Computer Science Education – From Approach to Concept,") 2021 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), 2021, pp. 1233-1236, doi: 10.1109/EDUCON46332.2021.945395 .link ↩︎

  3. R. Liu and H. Yang, "Chaos and Fractal for Creative Computing," 2014 IEEE 8th International Symposium on Service Oriented System Engineering, 2014, pp. 470-473, doi: 10.1109/SOSE.2014.83.link ↩︎

  4. I. Bergström and A. F. Blackwell, "The practices of programming," 2016 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2016, pp. 190-198, doi: 10.1109/VLHCC.2016.7739684. ↩︎

  5. Yuecheng Wang and Tian Song. 2020. Open Up-Vote Assessment for Creative Coding: Model and Quality. In Proceedings of the 2020 The 2nd World Symposium on Software Engineering (WSSE 2020). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 60–65. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3425329.3425349 link ↩︎

  6. Cameron Burgess, Dan Lockton, Maayan Albert, and Daniel Cardoso Llach. 2020. Stamper: An Artboard-Oriented Creative Coding Environment. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–9. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382994 link ↩︎

  7. Bown, O., Angelo Fraietta, L. Loke and Sam Ferguson. “Creative Coding and Interaction Design for Media Multiplicities: Challenges, Paradigms and Frameworks.” Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (2020) link ↩︎