Transcriber: Lucy Arch Reviewer: Mujtaba Abdelwhab
Alright. Nice.
Hey, it’s amazing to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Today I want to talk about why I think that
creative coding is a tool for digital empowerment.
And I would like to do that by taking a look at digitization
in the last 30 years,
from my perspective.
So let’s start in the year 1985, when my father founded a company.
So this is my father Hanz
and on this photo, he’s 35 years old
and this was his office back in 1985.
So if you take a look at the desk, you will see that there's no computer, right?
So graphic design was completely analog at that time.
So he was studying illustration and graphic design,
and it was completely analog.
There was no digital tools.
And just a few years later, in 1992, he bought a first computer for the agency.
So this is the agency of my father with the first workers there.
And if you take a look at the bottom right of the image here,
you see an Apple Macintosh.
So the Apple Macintosh basically completely revolutionized the industry.
And it basically enabled people to
create graphics, create layouts, and edit images.
And it was a complete revolution.
So this is a floppy disk from the 80s.
It is capable of saving one megabyte of data storage.
So one megabyte, that’s a very, very small photo taken with your smartphone.
In the 90s, these disks became popular, and were able to store 3.25 megabytes.
Imagine that! That’s an increase of 200%.
And in the end of the 90s, we had CD-ROM.
So the company of my father acquired the first CD-ROM burner,
and CD-ROM was able to save 650 megabytes.
Imagine that! These are 200 disks on one CD-ROM in just a few years.
We already can see that there’s an increase of
data storage here, and this is basically how the digitization
looked like in the 90s.
Also, the internet came to life and people started to create websites,
used email- This is how websites looked back then.
This is Wikipedia - very basic.
Nobody was really sure how the internet will affect the industry at that time.
Email accelerated communications.
So it was possible to send information via email, which was super convenient
compared with the way to go to a post office and send a letter,
which took several days.
This was the coolest phone back in the days when I was 16
the Nokia 3210, pretty cool device.
Imagine it was possible to call your friend at the end of the city.
And it was right in your pocket.
So, yeah, crazy times.
It was capable to write SMS messages,
so messages to another person anywhere in the city or in the country.
That was magical at the time,
And it had this amazing snake game!
So 15 years of digitization,
the company of my father just adapted to computer in the beginning of the 90s.
This fundamentally changed how they worked.
And new data storage and capacities just fundamentally changed
how the business of graphic design looked like.
It was just an exponential growth and an exponential transformation.
And I think this is very interesting and also questionable,
but I will speak about that in a minute.
So first of all, digital technologies and technologies in general just
simplify the whole job of a graphic designer,
but it also accelerated the whole industry.
That means also the competition adapted all these new technologies.
And it didn't mean that the job became better or the work became better
or more efficient.
Well, it became more efficient,
but basically, the whole industry just accelerated.
OK, let's fast forward to the present. So today we live in the year 2021.
And let’s talk about some pros and cons of modern technologies.
Digitisation costs us some expensive collateral damage.
That's a fact, and that's something we often don't think think about enough.
We’ve got social media, for example.
Social media is amazing. I love it.
It’s so cool we can connect with anyone in the world around topics.
We can create forums, create groups on Facebook,
share all photos with people in Asia and stuff.
It’s incredible. It’s so cool.
It just unites people all around the planet.
But at the same time, it’s caused some collateral damage
like stress, anxiety, addiction.
Addiction is a big problem in social media,
so it’s a really, really big thing.
Narcissism, and yes, social stress.
And I think we don’t think about this enough
people just adapt technologies kind of blindly
and don’t think about the negative consequences.
Social media also leads to political instabilities.
We’ve got this echo chambers, so people with
strange and wrong assumptions get positive feedback from
social media channels and groups.
And that's a huge problem for our democracy,
and we’ve got these [monopolies].
So I mean, imagine that we’ve got some companies in the US
controlling how the world communicates.
And that’s a big problem. We don’t think about this enough.
OK. Let's look at smartphones.
So I guess everyone in this place
loves his or her or their smartphone, right?
It’s an amazing technology, right?
Think of that, it’s our bank office, our sports coach,
our navigation device, our photo camera,
our video editing studio.
Imagine that, right?
Think of the Nokia 3210.
This is amazing, but at the same time,
smartphones lead to some catastrophic-
caused collateral damage, which is catastrophic,
like the exploitation of workers in Asian factories,
environmental damage, and the loss of intimacy.
It changes the way how we communicate.
It changes the way how we interact with other people,
and we don't think about this too much.
And now since a few months, we have COVID. Right?
COVID was the accelerator of all times, the accelerator of digitization.
So within a few months, we just shifted the whole educational system
and the whole way how we work into the digital.
So I don’t exactly know what kind of consequences will
become visible in a few years,
but I am very sure that this is a huge problem.
I think it can’t be good if we just
educate our children by letting them watching a rectangle.
It’s not really good. Anyway, you get the point.
I think that, digitization is something we really should question.
And I like this quote by John Maeda.
He says “Computation is made by us,
and we are now all collectively responsible for its outcomes.”
We are the people who make and shape how digitization,
or what kind of digitization we will have.
We are the people who shape that.
And it's something that people don't think too much about.
They think that digitization is something that happens to them.
OK, so we are responsible, right?
And I think it's very frustrating when I look at my students or, you know,
the young people around, they don't really care about that too much.
They live in a digital comfort zone paralyzed by applications,
by gadgets, new experiences.
It’s very sad, I think.
But I’m just one person, right?
I’m just a little light on this huge planet.
I can’t change the situation, but I’m asking myself pretty often,
how can I contribute something positive into this situation?
Well, I’m a design educator.
I work on several universities across Germany,
and I teach graphic design students to code.
I teach something that's called creative coding.
So coding or programming with an artistic purpose.
And a few years ago, 2019,
I went back to university to study digital media and experiment
because I wanted to find and research
the philosophy behind programming in times of digitization.
I wanted to find out what kind of role I could play in this world.
So that’s why I went back to uni
and there was one book that I’ve just found while researching
that really changed my perspective. It’s called Code@Art,
and has been released in 2005 by [unintelligible].
And in that book, they state to understand programming as an artistic practice,
and programming as an elementary cultural technique.
So to put it in one line with reading, writing, and math.
From their perspective, that way, programming could become
a tool for digital empowerment,
a tool to demystify the seemingly over powerful technologies.
But to do that, we must cultivate this notion of programming anew
and free it from the cliché of culturelessness.
We have to kind of find a new perspective on coding
and make it more attractive to people.
And I love that. It’s amazing.
So the question is, how can we do that?
What can we do to achieve that goal?
Well, creative coding is already the solution.
So programming as an artistic practice,
the medium has been around already since a few years or already in the last decade.
In the 50s and 60s, there were people creating art with technologies,
but through Processing - which is a programming language
that I use for my teaching - It became increasingly popular,
so Processing is amazing.
It has been invented in 2001 by Casey Rious and Ben Fry,
who are students of John Maeda.
And it’s thought and built as a programming language
for artists and designers.
So this is how it looks like.
This is Processing.
As you can see, these are just eight lines of code,
and you hit that run button on the top left and that executes the code,
and then the program compiles, runs, and displays a window where
the composition you've just created with code is displayed.
So these are just eight lines of code.
Just to display a rectangle before Processing,
it needed hundreds of lines of code to just display very simple geometry.
So let's just simplify the whole process of programming significantly.
It’s easy to use.
It always has a visual output that means it appeals to visual learning types,
creatives, artists, designers, architects,
children, teenagers...
It teaches you the very basic principles of coding.
functions, variables, conditional statements,
all the complicated stuff.
But at the same time, it just hides the complexity that's not necessary
and just kind of avoids an inconvenient writing process, which is great.
It’s also free and open source,
and so that means anyone in the world can download it for free and use it.
Nobody charges anyone to use Processing,
and the coolest thing about it is that it is a world wide, diverse,
open and friendly community that’s connected through the internet,
with many people working on projects contributing to
the whole Processing application and programming language.
And it's just the coolest digital place I've ever seen.
So it’s really, really amazing.
So there are conferences, hackathons, and festivals...
Events all around programming with an artistic purpose,
which is amazing. I love that.
As I told you, I’m a design educator,
so that means I teach graphic designers how to use programming language to
express themselves.
And that’s a huge problem in design education, I think,
because I feel like my curriculum or what
I teach, creative coding, always has been perceived as an optional extension to
a very static and more-or-less old-fashioned curriculum.
It's not really implemented into the way how people teach design,
that’s something I find very difficult and very questionable
because in times of digitization,
we need a modern way of teaching and creative coding can contribute-
Well, make this whole educational system a lot better, I think.
Let’s sum this up.
Digitisation is an exponential process.
We live in times, in the middle, in the eye of the storm.
AI is around the corner, it will confront us with enormously difficult questions
and I think we have to question deeply
how we perceive and react to digitization, right?
So as artists and designers, we have the power we can create artefacts,
artworks that depict and question the digital.
And it's something that I find especially exciting and interesting.
And yeah, so I empower young creatives for an increasingly digitized future.
And that’s why I’m here today, and that’s my talk.
Thank you very much.