Creative Computing

Joel Gethin Lewis

Unit 6 / Block 2: "Creative Practice: Computational Environments for the Web": Lecture 0: Introduction to the Summer term

Have you taken the register first? Are you recording?

What I'm going to talk about today:

  1. What questions to do you have for me?
  2. Brief: Care and Play.
  3. Background to the brief: David Graeber: "From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes".
  4. What Telematic work has been made before?
  5. A tour of all the examples we'll be going through this summer.
  6. p5.js instance mode.
  7. Refresher p5.js demos.
  8. End of year show on Glitch.com
  9. What questions to do you have for me?

0. What questions to do you have for me?

  • What questions to do you have for me?
  • What are your concerns? What are you worried about? What do you want to ask but you are embarrassed?
  • All questions allowed!
  • 5 minutes to message me on Slack in private.
  • This idea came from Zach Lieberman. He does this exercise at the start of every session of School of Poetic Computation in New York.

1. Brief: Care and Play

  • Two renewable human activities: Care and Play.
  • Care can be physical or mental or psychic.
  • Not just care for humans, care for objects (repair), care for our environment, care for non-human organisms. Teaching is also a form of care (care for the future?). Honest journalism could be care for the past.
  • Play is not just games, but acting, singing, dancing, making art, performing.
  • Can you think of other examples of Care and Play?

1. Brief: Care and Play (continued)

  • I'm going to concentrate my lectures into two areas:
    1) Computer vision in the browser to allow for bodily, facial, object and gaze interaction.
    2) Multiplayer interaction to allow many users to use 1) together.
  • For the end of year show, I want you all to build web-based multiuser interactions to help people through these strange times.
  • Your projects don't need to be "worthy", they just have to make you and your peers feel care or play.
  • This is an opportunity to make tools that could help millions of people.
  • You are going to need to work together to help each other build these multiuser projects. You are going to need to help each other test and develop them. It's perfectly valid to make projects that solely help other people make, test and improve their projects. What matters to you right now? Why?

1. Brief: Care and Play (continued)

  • I'd like to try out a new method of doing crits. This was borrowed from Golan Levin.
  • I'd like everyone to make a Google Doc when people are presenting their work, and work together to make a whole document of thinking to give to the person at the end of their crit. This document will form the basis of the discussion we have immediately afterwards.
  • Is there a better tool for this than Google Docs? Etherpad?
  • Let's take a look at the weekly schedule for the course, including going through the teams I've put you all into and the timings for your pair of individual tutorials with me.
  • What do you want your team names to be? I've already added you all to the GitHub as contributors, so edit as you see fit. Message me on Slack with your Github username if you don't have access.

2. Background to the brief:

  • The thinking for this term's project came from a presentation I saw between Christmas 2019 and NYE by David Graeber: "From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes":
  • More about David Graeber.
  • More about David Graeber's books.
  • Please take some time to watch this presentation today. Perhaps immediately after this lecture when you don't have a team meeting? Before lunch? You could even watch the video as a team.

3. What Telematic work has been made before?

4. A preview of some of the most interesting examples we'll be going through this summer.

Use this list to help you start thinking about your project. Don't forget to sketch first! Keep those drawings and use them for the beginning of your end of term presentation. Suggestions for use are just that!

  • Average Brightness. Use this to detect the brightness of a room.
  • Frame Difference. Use this to detect the amount of movement in a room.
  • Colour tracking. Use this to let people draw with fruit.
  • Marker Tracking. Use this to allow people to make puppets with their fingers or nail varnish or t shirts.
  • Object Recognition. You'll need to run this locally Joel! (Run "http-server -c-1" in "/⁨2020_04_11_KyleMcDonaldCVExamples⁩/cv-examples-master⁩". Use this to understand people's environments.

4. A preview of some of the most interesting examples we'll be going through this summer (continued).

Use this list to help you start thinking about your project. Don't forget to sketch first! Keep those drawings and use them for the beginning of your end of term presentation. Suggestions for use are just that!

4. A preview of some of the most interesting examples we'll be going through this summer (continued).

Use this list to help you start thinking about your project. Don't forget to sketch first! Keep those drawings and use them for the beginning of your end of term presentation. Suggestions for use are just that!

5. p5.js instance mode

6. Refresher p5.js demos.

7. End of year show on Glitch.com

  • The end of year show will be completely online.
  • The end of year show will be hosted on Glitch.com.
  • What do you think about using the lovely p5.js demos from Matt DesLauriers as template?
  • P.S. at Matt says, the layout was heavily inspired by Mark Webster's Designing Programs.
  • It's going to be up to you guys to come up with a design, I've got a paid account at Glitch, so your apps won't go to sleep - so you can have persistent high scores, worlds or spaces. They also have unlimited users!

8. What questions to do you have for me?

  • What questions to do you have for me?
  • What are your concerns? What are you worried about? What do you want to ask but you are embarrassed?
  • All questions allowed!

Thanks!