We’ve just completed a series of free creative coding workshops with Margate based artists and makers, in particular people who work at local Artist Studios. The workshops were part of our ongoing digital art residency at Dreamland.
We’re working with the educational team at Dreamland to bring creative coding opportunities to as many people as possible across Thanet, and importantly, to get the results shown to the public.
Local artists & friends have said for a while now that they were keen to learn more about programming so it was about time we ran workshops aimed at them. We had people from Marine Studios, Limbo, Crate, Resort, Bon Volks, FireEyeLand, Northdown Studios, Gordon House and others. We ran the event in the great Northdown Studio space.
The theme for the two day workshops was Parades and Cascades inspired by Fernand Leger, the funfair at Dreamland and also the Parades and Carnivals in Margate. We wanted everyone to get up to speed with basic pattern making in the free and open source Processing Language and then also design and animate their own walking creature. These were projected about the space as they were made.
In the future we will be looking to get the individual results from this workshop into Dreamland itself (perhaps on their new digital display screens) and also to showcase them in a secret night time walk with projections around the Northdown Road area next year. Hopefully they will also be shown at the Northdown Studio Christmas Party.
The results were wild and varied and the participants learnt a lot and had a good time. It was interesting to to see the different approaches – we can see lots of future directions for projects. There were good conversations between people from different art practices and studios – hopefully some future collaborations. Everyone on the workshops said they were interested in carrying on with coding – and we will be looking to see how we can set up a free coding club for artists and makers next year. Not run by us, but we’ll be there helping out – we want to learn from other people too.
