Monday, October 27, 2014

Eyeo Recap


Five months later, I'm still feeling the effects of Eyeo. It gave me a fresh perspective on creative code as a profession, its applications, and how to get creative, to go beyond and expand on available information in order to create a more immersive experience or to solve an interesting problem. For instance, adding more information, such as photos, geotagged tweets, or memories, to location/GPS data to create a data story (I'd check out Pleens as an example of this).

I also realized how little of this community and field is known to the rest of the programming world, especially for those in more straightforward, software engineering positions as well as for students who are still in grade school or in undergraduate degrees. Students should be acquainted with figures like Frieder Nake, one of the first to write programs to generate art, or Lillian Schwartz, one of the creators of some of the first computer-animated films exhibited as works of fine art, or Roman Verostko, who wrote his own software to control a line plotter which then draws algorithmically generated, unique pen and ink drawings. This kind of exposure is essential to generate interest and to promote continued innovation in design, creative code, their intersection, and their application to other fields.

Projects like The Creators Project and festivals like Northern Spark, a night-long installation art festival in Minneapolis, are some of the first steps in making people aware of the existence and potential of creative code as a field. I look forward to seeing projects and events like these become more prevalent in the media, hopefully inspiring more people to experiment and explore new possibilities.