Creative Coding Research Articles

Embodied/Encoded: A Study of Presence in Digital Music

Presence in Embodied/Encoded is concerned with the physical and embodied dimensions of musicking in relation to digital-informational representations of such phenomena. I explore presence through practices of recording, creative coding, audio production, and spatial electronic music composition. Of particular interest is the link between presence and the sensual/corporeal aspects of sound production and listening. Research in embodied music cognition and extended reality provide a foundation for this type of meaning formation. In the context of immersive electronic music, I suggest that physical presence – a sense of ‘being somewhere’—emerges not just from images/representations of place, but from peripheral aspects of the (embodied) acoustic experience such as spatial proximity and distance, diffuseness, resonance and reverberation, noise floor, etc. Consequently, musical meaning in “Embodied/Encoded” moves away from the symbolic dimension of electronic sounds toward meaning as an outcome of embodied interaction with the environment. The concept of presence can also apply to ‘mixed’ music, or combinations of acoustic and electronic sources, in which virtual presence is complicated by real bodies and spaces. Digital technology renders sound a flexible, malleable entity—a ‘flickering’ signifier to borrow from Hayles—capable of reconfiguring presence in creative ways. The dance between encoded and embodied dimensions inspires and informs this artistic research. Through a body of immersive music and multimedia documentation, I unpack connections between presence and its digital abstractions.

Mimetic Possibilities: Collaboration through movement in multimedia opera

Abstract In the opera Act I: Invocation – The Ghost Trilogy, artists from music composition, Greek tragedy, creative coding, and opera performance collaborated to create an artwork that engages with philosophy and technology. A light sculpture with a novel Internet of Things (IoT) architecture was adapted for the opera’s stage, where both the sculpture and its controlling interface were programmed to visually represent musical processes within the composer’s approach. While filming, the light sculpture contributed to the dramatic context through movement and gestural interaction between the sculpture and the soprano. Drawing upon Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and its inquiry into movement for engaging with new technology expressively, movement and gesture, transpiring from mimetic techniques in the opera, were central in this interdisciplinary collaboration.

Validating a Creative Coding Rubric through expressive activities for elementary grades

Creative coding offers the opportunity to express oneself on open-ended coding platforms through artistic expression, storytelling, and experimenting with program syntax in unconventional ways. However, research on the creative aspects of coding education and its assessment remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by developing and validating a Creative Coding Rubric tailored for early childhood creative coding projects. Our study collected and analyzed ScratchJr projects from 1201 children in grades K-2, revealing substantial agreement among raters (n = 15) for the rubric. Additionally, significant positive correlations among rubric items and high reliability (α = .93) indicate its validity and consistency. This Creative Coding Rubric presents a promising tool for early childhood educational settings to evaluate creative coding skills in playful, open-ended ways.

Digital poesis impulse: A methodology of creative coding with GPT as co-pilot

Any poem can be digitalised, but under what conditions might the poet desire a digital incarnation of their creative output? And for a writer with hobbyist coding skills, might ChatGPT be a suitable partner for creative coding? Faced with three digital poetry commissions and the terror of the blank screen, the author explores questions of poetry and desire, artificial intelligence and authorship, and the tools which enable her digital writing practice. As Irina Paperno (2004) notes, “scholars do not know what to do with diaries” (p. 565). Where the author’s research asks what can be done with journals-as-archives the experimental, multimodal approach of digital poesis breaks open the notion that static containers such as memoir or biography are the best ways into literary archives. The author discovers the coding container as a playful place to enact modes of relationality between text and medium, mother and daughter, archive and archon. Much like Winnicott’s (2005) mother-child play space enables an infant to test the limits of their inner world and external reality, a source-code editor offers unlimited combinatory potential for enacting a relational and material archival response. Through exploring practice-based research, this article tracks the methodology of the three digital poems from ideation to execution and publication, offering exegetical insights along with a detailed accounting of the tools and processes used in the making.

Tailoring Full STEAM Ahead Empowerment: Creative Coding for 21st Century Girls

INTRODUCTION: This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the Creative Coding project’s impact on female empowerment.OBJECTIVES: The project addresses the gender disparity in STEAM fields by integrating coding and art for girls aged 10-15, using the Strudel tool that combines real-time live coding and music composition.METHODS: Through observation and interviews with the girls who participated and performed at the end of the Creative Coding project, but also with those who dropped out, we cast a deep look into the positive and negative parameters to tailor concrete measures for every girl empowerment - not only super achievers. We collaborated with teachers and female mentors from the Computer Science and Engineering Department as relatable role models, to support feelings of belonging and spark curiosity. Using the new user-friendly Strudel tool that supports the integration of art, music, and audio-visual elements, we aimed at an engaging learning experience. To tailor new actions and increase attrition we used a mess map for analysis of the wicked problem of dropouts. Finally, collaboration among the girls and peer learning were expected as by-product effects.RESULTS: Positive outcomes include increased interest, self-confidence, creativity, and aspirations in STEAM subjects among the girls. However, a more comprehensive and supportive environment is recognized as necessary to engage a broader group of girls in STEAM activities. The findings highlight the importance of cultivating curiosity, providing mentorship, promoting inclusivity and collaboration, and integrating creativity in education to inspire and empower girls in coding and STEAM disciplines.CONCLUSION: The paper concludes by emphasizing the potential of Creative Coding practices and the audio-visual perception of music to enhance girls’ empowerment, creativity, and interest in coding and STEAM fields.

// May your rage inform your actions: Embodying the monster and trans nonbinary praxis in creative coding

This project is presented as a critical call and response developed from texts initially written and assembled by KT Duffy, seen here as italicized portions of this project. In what follows, we consider Susan Stryker’s formation of the monster as the impulse for a set of theorizations around the assemblage of non-binary trans processes and methods. Advocating the release of the monstrous to actualize collective liberation, we situate the glitch as an essential animating element, utilizing this “visual monstrosity of error and interruption” in solidarity with Abolition Feminism to scope out the ways technology is counter revolutionary. Reflecting on the objective portrayal of technology, we examine how its destruction does not cease for communities made marginalized, even as the field is diversified. Mining the spaces between lines of code, we illustrate that coding is no longer an esoteric field and that coding and coding education can no longer exist in a vacuum. Instead, it must be grounded in examining how histories of capitalism and racialized hierarchies continue to cause harm. Here, we map out a praxis of trans-coding that activates the monster and its inherited glitches as a tool of disruption spawned in the spaces between binaries. Finally, we situate trans-coding in solidarity with Abolition feminism, where, from this in-between space, it propels the explosion of normative mediations in service of not only speculation but as an actualization of an Abolition Feminism imaginary.

Space shaping in the design process for creative coding: a case study in media multiplicities

ABSTRACT This paper describes the design process for The Mind at Work, a light and sound art installation using networked devices, as a case study in working creatively with complex and unknown technological systems. The art installation evoked the development of a reusable framework for making scalable, re-configurable, audiovisual systems, while creating a specific artwork for a gallery exhibition. The development process was observed systematically to understand how creative coders navigate the challenge of integrating the technical and aesthetic considerations simultaneously. Building on existing design literature, the research is centred on an activity we call space shaping: setting up an environment to create tools for exploration. We consider critical points in the design process which affect how space shaping takes place.

THE EXCITEMENT OF FOOTBALL KICKS OFF IN QATAR: A SAMPLE OF TWITTER DATA ANALYSIS

This research was created by making use of the opinions of Twitter users about the Qatar 2022 World Cup, which has a great impact on the world. The countries and the football players who participated in the World Cup, the country where the organization was held, and the general assessments constitute the whole of the research. This case study, which reflects a social reality such as the World Cup, was examined by an inductive method. In order to achieve a more successful output in terms of more transparent and professional progress of the process, the MAXQDA program was preferred. This research was structured in two sections. Content analysis of 5,988 tweets posted in Turkish was conducted in the first section. According to the data obtained from the tweets posted by the viewers under the theme "Qatar 2022 World Cup Overview", the first section consists of 4 categories, namely "Organization, Football Players, Countries, and Assessment", 36 codes, and 11 sub-codes. Sentiment analysis of 79,574 tweets was conducted in the second section. Users tweeted Positive (15,973), Slightly positive (30,533), Negative (3,228), Slightly negative (6,529), and Neutral (23,311) emotional tweets. Codes, categories, and themes were created using the "creative coding" option included in the MAXQDA program. The completion of the codes created in the consensus, took place in a total of four months. The analysis was visualized, and the code frequencies were added using the "MAXMaps Hierarchical Code-Subcode Model" option on the "visual tools" tab of the program.

Creative Coding as Method and Goal in a Gender Diverse First-Year Seminar

FIERCE (Fostering Inclusion by Engaging in Real-world Computing Education) is a first-year academic program for gender diverse students entering UMass's computer science or informatics degree program. In response to feedback that students wanted to be exposed to more actual programming prompts in addition to the more theoretical content which was the focus of the previous year's seminar, this year's seminar is focused on Creative Coding.

In-Habitant: An Inquiry into a Non-Dualistic Duality of Human and Nonhuman

Abstract In-Habitant is an art and life project based on artist Umut Tasa’s decadelong encounters with urban wildlife. It is a quest to utilize art as a research method to contemplate her memories, nature discoveries, audiovisual records, and archive of haiku and prose through a body of artworks. These artworks bring together the corporeality of nonhumans with their digital re-presentation and literary text with creative coding. The author inquires into dualistic and nondualistic ontological approaches to human-nonhuman relations in urban settings.

Creative Coding as a Modern Art Tool

The research examines the phenomenon of creative programming as an example of the interaction between art and technology. The historical prerequisites for its emergence and various tools for its implementation are analysed. Systematization and analysis of existing platforms and computer languages for creative programming made it possible to classify them chronologically, according to principles of work, and technical characteristics. The main ways of using creative programming in different periods were explored in analysing contemporary art projects that used creative programming. Thus, The Algobabez duo used real-time programming with SuperCollider software at their performances. The capabilities of MAX/MSP made it possible to implement the performer-computer interaction in Inter-sax-tive by composer Nicolas Scherzinger. In the interactive project Messa di Voce, the sound is transformed with the help of the Openframeworks software into graphics, which affects the performers. In other cases, the software was written specifically for an art project. In the Abraham project, artist and programmer Gene Kogan tries to create an autonomous artificial artist who has his own will and can create authentic visual images. As part of the multidisciplinary interactive project "Hakanaï", we can see how code written specifically for the project, allows performer to interact with a visual projection (mapping) that, in turn, interacts with the performer’s moves. We prove that creative programming has become a promising, independent tool of creativity within modern interdisciplinary artistic practices, borders of which continue to expand thanks to the open code approach and the involvement of a community of like-minded people.

Problem solved, but how? An exploratory study into students’ problem solving processes in creative coding tasks

Problem solving capabilities have often been reported by teachers as a key benefit from creative coding activities in school-age children. However, few studies to date have defined problem solving, and investigated how it is operationalised in interdisciplinary creative coding tasks. This study aims to build knowledge about students’ use of computational thinking and computer science concepts for problem solving when coding animated narratives. The research investigated students’ coding processes using data gathered from audio and device display recordings and semi-structured interviews. Results suggest limitations to the use of creative coding tasks if the expectation is to develop computational thinking and systematic problem solving strategies, or learn basic computer science concepts. They revealed that novice students rarely solved coding problems using optimal technically-based strategies despite being given explicit instruction on their use, opting instead to bypass problems by adjusting intended outcomes, or by using low level code translation strategies. Results demonstrate that engaging computational thinking or even demonstrating understanding of basic computer science concepts was not a requirement to produce a viable creative coding outcome. This study contributes new understanding of students’ coding practices when engaged in creative coding tasks in regular, non-specialist classrooms. Its findings challenge the commonly-held assumption that coding is a natural ‘vehicle’ to develop computational thinking and systematic approaches to problem solving. It also questions the learning that results from the non-technical, inefficient and often ineffective problem solving practices students employ during ‘creative coding’ tasks, that are frequently used by non-specialist teachers in response to curriculum requirements.

Student responses to creative coding in biomedical science education.

Biomedical science students need to learn to code. Graduates face a future where they will be better prepared for research higher degrees and the workforce if they can code. Embedding coding in a biomedical curriculum comes with challenges. First, biomedical science students often experience anxiety learning quantitative and computational thinking skills and second biomedical faculty often lack expertise required to teach coding. In this study, we describe a creative coding approach to building coding skills in students using the packages of Processing and Arduino. Biomedical science students were taught by an interdisciplinary faculty team from Medicine and Health, Science and Architecture, Design and Planning. We describe quantitative and qualitative responses of students to this approach. Cluster analysis revealed a diversity of student responses, with a large majority of students who supported creative coding in the curriculum, a smaller but vocal cluster, who did not support creative coding because either the exercises were not sufficiently challenging or were too challenging and believed coding should not be in a Biomedical Science curriculum. We describe how two creative coding platforms, Processing and Arduino, embedded and used to visualize human physiological data, and provide responses to students, including those minority of students, who are opposed to coding in the curriculum This study found a variety of students responses in a final year capstone course of an undergraduate Biomedical Science degree where future pathways for students are either in research higher degrees or to the workforce with a future which will be increasingly data driven.

Evaluating young children's creative coding: rubric development and testing for ScratchJr projects.

Project-based assessment has been used to evaluate coding projects created by students for a long time. Nevertheless, there is a lack of rigorously tested project-based coding rubrics that are developmentally appropriate for early childhood. This study presented the development and testing of a coding rubric to evaluate children’s creations with the popular ScratchJr app for early childhood, as well as results from field testing of the rubric. This paper first presents the ScratchJr Project Rubric development phases, and then a field test on 228 ScratchJr projects from 1st and 2nd grade students (n = 87, aged 6–7 years old) across three time points. The results showed that the rubric demonstrates validity and reliability, and can measure changes in the project quality across time points. While the rubric was designed for researchers and teachers to evaluate ScratchJr projects, the design and conceptual framework is applicable to other programming languages for children that invite creative coding.

예술 활동을 통한 창의적 코딩에 관한 연구 - 교육 프로그램 사례를 기반으로

Creative coding is a type of computer programming intended to create something expressive rather than functional. If the user does not simply consider efficiency, creative coding can offer multiple ways to produce results that are aesthetically better than just one correct answer. Through the recently expanded virtual reality environment and artificial intelligence technology that imitates human cognition, fundamental research on humans is now more important. Therefore, in the education fields, methods of learning through physical and aesthetic experiences are considered to be important. The meaning of aesthetic education through artistic activities has been introduced in many pedagogical theories. Although one aspect is such that aesthetic sensitivity education can facilitate the psychological adaptation of those being educated when they participate in new educational activities, the importance of learning through aesthetic experience had been highlighted in qualitative learning through experience. This study also examines the evolutionary process of computers as an expressive medium of individuals and software developed for artists and designers. The background and examples of the global coding education movement will be explored, and an example of a creative coding curriculum applied by the researcher in an actual educational setting will be introduced. In particular, in this era where data is becoming the material of creators, creative coding that combines the principles of formative art and computational thinking will provide coding education through aesthetic experiences and a new methodology for art creation. As the main purpose of the convergence of art and technology lies in the development of creativity, creative coding can be used in activities to nurture technology-based creators rather than technology consumers in a meaningful way.

Enabling Programmatic Data Mining as Musicking: The Fluid Corpus Manipulation Toolkit

AbstractThis article presents a new software toolbox to enable programmatic mining of sound banks for musicking and musicking-driven research. The toolbox is available for three popular creative coding environments currently used by “techno-fluent” musicians. The article describes the design rationale and functionality of the toolbox and its ecosystem, then the development methodology—several versions of the toolbox have been seeded to early adopters who have, in turn, contributed to the design. Examples of these early usages are presented, and we describe some observed musical affordances of the proposed approach to the exploration and manipulation of music corpora, as well as the main roadblocks encountered. We finally reflect on a few emerging themes for the next steps in building a community around critical programmatic mining of sound banks.

A Case for Creative Coding

A Case for Creative Coding

‘I gave that cue.’ Integrating dance studies, praxeology, and computational perspectives to model change in the case study of William Forsythe’s Duo

ABSTRACT Choreographer William Forsythe calls the work Duo a ‘project’—reflecting the piece’s long history of vicissitudes from 1996 to the present. We attempt to visualize continuity and change over several iterations of Duo, spanning a period of 20 years. Our methods involved graphical and statistical approaches to performance video annotation, considering seven videos acquired from Forsythe’s private archive. Collaboration with Duo dancers was critical to develop this choreographic knowledge. The duet Duo was chosen to focus on annotation of partnering, choreographic structure, and interpretation; the case study furthermore enabled review of annotation methods from Forsythe’s Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced (Forsythe et al. 2009) and built upon prior research of entrainment in Duo (Waterhouse, Watts, and Bläsing 2014). Studying a choreography longitudinally, with close regard of the performers’ testimonies and digital traces, the problem required innovative methods. For this article, we focus on how annotation was used within this project. We outline our particular interdisciplinary approach, merging perspectives from dance studies, praxeology and creative coding. We present the language and concepts of annotation chosen, technical tools used for annotating, procedures of annotation analysis, and conclusions of the research. Thereby we present novel visualizations of choreographic process.

Pre-service Teacher Perceptions in Integrating Maker-Centered Learning in their Mathematics and Education Initial Teacher Education Programme

Aquest article descriu un programa innovador "C24M2: codificació creativa per a creadors de matemàtiques", en un programa de formació simultània de professors de pregrau. Utilitzant Makerspace en un entorn universitari, el programa va fomentar una cultura de creativitat i innovació mitjançant la combinació de matemàtiques i les assignatures STEM més àmpliament reconegudes. En abordar el desafiament de preparar els professors de manera eficaç per ensenyar àrees STEM clau, com ara el pensament computacional, d’una manera atractiva i eficaç, aquest article descriu un disseny i una estructura del fabricant, integrant la física amb la codificació per ordinador, per abordar el desafiament de preparar els estudiants professors. de matemàtiques. L’objectiu del document és validar i explorar les percepcions de la informàtica dels professors de serveis previs i demostra el potencial de l’aprenentatge centrat en els creadors com a context potent per promoure i millorar l’educació STEM, tant entre els alumnes com en els professors de serveis previs. Aquest article examina si el disseny del C24M2 afavoreix una actitud positiva cap a la informàtica per a aquest conjunt de professors de pre-servei. La investigació realitzada aborda les qüestions més destacades de sosteniment i integració de l’aprenentatge centrat en els creadors de manera més àmplia i sistemàtica dins de l’educació, en particular la necessitat de donar suport al desenvolupament professional del professorat en l’aprenentatge centrat en els creadors per mediar l’aprenentatge sostenible d’alt impacte a les escoles i altres entorns educatius.

Aleatoriedade como tecnologia especulativa: O randômico como instrumento na arte e no design

O texto discute a atualização do papel da aleatoriedade em processos criativos (poiesis e práxis), tanto em campos específicos quanto nas fronteiras colapsadas e movediças entre arte, design e tecnologia. Apresenta o dispositivo/código_Cubo Branco_exemplo de creative coding, obra criada utilizando parâmetros randômicos e por fim investiga exemplos artísticos, lógicos e tecnológicos enquanto possibilidades de se parametrizar o acaso como processo criativo.