Creative Coding and beyond: considering the social impact of technology

Moderated by Eno Henze a series of lectures delivered an insight into current trends. A curated line up of speakers working in various academic and applied domains shared insights into creative coding and the aesthetics of computer art.

The Symposium offered an introduction to the software toolkit vvvv, featured the first presentation of the vvvv group to a wider public and professionals from close-by disciplines and software languages, like Processing and opened the window to the future for the still young software community of vvvv.

Watch the lectures

Speakers sparking Enthusiasm

After the keynote by the vvvv developers, those visitors that did not know vvvv before, now understood the coherence of vvvv and NODE08. In his lecture “audio reactive visual feedback systems in vvvv”, Paul Prudence, who is known as an artists and writer of the successful research blog www.dataisnature.com, showcased one of his artistic works with vvvv.

The architect Berthold Scharrer, representing the Frankfurt based office Franken-Architekten spoke about “computed geometry in architecture”, drawing connections between computational work and hands on architecture. Another highlight was the lecture by Herbert W. Franke. Franke is working in the field of computer graphics and computer arts since the 50s and among other activities he is co-founder of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. Furthermore, Franke is considered to be one of the most important German Science Fiction authors. With a fascinating modality he reviewed the history of computer art by means of examples of his life work.

Casey Reas caught up with the first edition of his lecture “Form and code”. Reas is one of the most known software artists worldwide. Together with Ben Fry he initiated at the MIT Media Lab Processing, an open source programming environment for Image, Animation and Interaction, which is internationally used by software artists.