Creative Coding: Visual Experiments & Information Pipeline

an ongoing coding and research seminar

This is a very quickly put-together archive for the Creative Coding courses I built over the years at ALBA Ecole des Beaux Arts de Beyrouth. It also includes more recent experiments with tools: making images, self-generating, etc.

Creative coding and visual experiments

Github repository for this website: https://github.com/jrgd/creative_coding_website/; there you can access the tools to build this static website from a bunch of repositories, markdown files and images.

This website/repository/archive is itself an experiment. It is an ongoing research seminar. It concatenates a few projects and experiments available otherwise as GitHub repositories.

Context: what this website is

• a growing collection of experiments and quick explorations of ideas and thoughts experiments
• a tool to share creative coding courses content, context and reflexions with my students; assignments, ideas to develop, visual research: how do we create a similar image using only code?
• a primer into code for non-engineering-oriented persons We generally use pseudo-code to play with variables and loops, logic structure, explain concepts, discover languages and dig in the depth of how to generate and manipulate bitmaps, vectors, animation, 3d, etc.

The topics and subjects we started to explore and some I would like to investigate more in the future:

• designing tools to design; create your own tools
• coding tools, interfaces
  • text editor
  • servers, infrastructure
  • front end language
    • css, html (rediscovering the basics)
    • javascript, jQuery
    • three js, vr/xr, stl (3d printing models created by code)
  • back end
    • php
    • nodes
• generating images, different formats: bitmap, vector, 3d, animation and films
• creating cognitive processes, object behaviours and reactive interactions that enrich the meaning being transmitted.

Website content

The website has two main parts for now:

• the ongoing experiments chronologically numbered
• the notes investigating aspects of those experiments as well as research for future topics and exercices.

Website notes: deploying

• individual experiment repository are stored publicly on GitHub
• only the first line of the readme.md is used to generate the list of experiments
• they must be added one by one
  • each experiment got its own repository

Website building

It's using some deployment tools:

• yarn clone_repo this will clone the repositories listed for the archive in the website structure
• yarn build will parse the source directories, copy repositories, generate files (html) from markdown notes and create zip files

Website hosting

For now, it's using Github hosted pages to serve the ./docs content. This content is parsed/generated by the build command above

• contact: jr@jeromerigaud.com