I’ve finally recovered from directing ART AND CODE, a conference about “programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us” that we held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from March 6-9th. The conference featured 26 workshops in 11 different arts-programming languages, and lecture presentations by fifteen or so of the key innovators leading massive revolutions in software-arts education.

I’m truly honored to share the stage, in the photo above, with the ART AND CODE presenters. From left to right they are: John Maloney (MIT/Scratch), Golan Levin (CMU/Flong), Tom McMail (Microsoft Research), Ira Greenberg (Miami U. Ohio), Hans-Christoph Steiner (NYU/Pure Data), Evelyn Eastmond (MIT/Scratch), Casey Reas (UCLA/Processing), Zachary Lieberman (Parsons/openFrameworks), Theodore Watson (openFrameworks), Ben Fry (Seed Visualization Lab/Processing), Arturo Castro (openFrameworks), Sebastian Oschatz (Meso/VVVV), Daniel Shiffman (NYU), Luke DuBois (NYU/Cycling74), Dr. Woohoo (ExtendScript), and Why the Lucky Stiff (Hackety Hack). Not pictured here, but also presenting at the conference were Don Slater (CMU/Alice) and Dr. Wanda Dann (CMU/Alice).

One of the most inspiring and unusual aspects of the conference was the diversity of its attendees, who came from all walks of life. There were about 250 registered participants, hailing from 6 countries and at least 25 states of the union. Their ages ranged from 11 to 71. There were middle-school teachers from an Indian reservation in Montana; university professors of Computer Science; cyberpunk European C++ hackers; graduate students in media arts and interaction design; and a bevy of high-school and undergraduate students from a large swath of the American Rust Belt. Above, a photo of the audience during the Sunday lecture by Why the Lucky Stiff.

(Above) A row of attendees in a Processing workshop taught by Casey Reas.

(Above) Attendees in a Scratch workshop taught by Evelyn Eastmond and John Maloney.

Above and below: a workshop in openFrameworks and C++ directed by Zachary Lieberman, Theodore Watson and Arturo Castro.

ART AND CODE was made possible by a generous grant from Microsoft Research, with oversight by the Center for Computational Thinking at CMU. The conference was also my first major initiative as the newly-appointed director of the Carnegie Mellon STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and couldn’t have happened without the help of its amazing administrators and student volunteers. ART AND CODE was extensively documented in Twitter, blogs, and a pile of Flickr photo sets by various conference participants:

• Golan Levin
• AJ Starks
  
• Marty McGuire
• Eric Mill
• Ecin
  
• Everyplace
• Jon.Pliske

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