It's humbling to think we began this project eight years ago, intending to self-publish it as a short ‘zine or guidebook. As we compiled assignments, references, and exercises, it grew into what you hold in your hands. Like most endeavors, it has been made possible by the generous efforts of so many people—more than we can name here. Many of our colleagues and peers have made direct contributions, and many more have lit our path with their work in the field.
We are indebted to Casey Reas for writing the Foreword. His unparalleled perspective on the field emerges from his tremendously important work creating Processing with Ben Fry, as well as from his teaching and art making. We also wish to acknowledge Casey, Ben, and Golan's mentor John Maeda, whose foundational work and influential guidance still shape the field today. Along with John, we are grateful to Christiane Paul, Ellen Lupton, and Chris Coleman, whose panoptic understandings of new media arts and design gives such gravity to their kind endorsements.
Thank you to our book production team: our copy editor and savior Shannon Fry, whose wizardry is woven through so many of the publications on our shelves, and our designers Kyuha (Q) Shim and Minsun Eo, who have pulled off a unique and remarkable achievement in using computational techniques to design this book. These are gorgeous pages. At MIT Press, we are grateful to editors Doug Sery, Noah Springer, and Gita Manaktala, and to designers Yasuyo Iguchi and Emily Gutheinz, and production coordinator Jay McNair, for their stewardship and accommodation of this unusual project.
Thank you to all of our interviewees—Taeyoon Choi, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Luke DuBois, De Angela Duff, Zach Lieberman, Rune Madsen, Lauren McCarthy, Allison Parrish, Phœnix Perry, Dan Shiffman, Winnie Soon, Tatsuo Sugimoto, and Jer Thorp—for generously sharing their time, perspectives, and energies. Thanks also to our colleagues who provided material and gave feedback and advice on our manuscript: Daniel Cardoso-Llach, Matt Deslauriers, Benedikt Groß, Jon Ippolito, Sam Lavigne, Joel Gethin Lewis, Ramsey Nasser, Allison Parrish, Paolo Pedercini, Caroline Record, Tom White, and our anonymous reviewers. We sincerely appreciate the many artists, designers, researchers, and former students who graciously gave their permissions for us to share their works in these pages.
So many of the projects featured in this book were nurtured and made possible by creative coding communities and the open-source toolkits they develop. We express deep gratitude to the Processing Foundation, the Processing community, and the p5.js community. Lauren McCarthy, Dorothy Santos, and Johanna Hedva, your commitment to diversity, access, and community building has set the standard for us all. Thanks also to Zach Lieberman, Theo Watson, Arturo Castro, Kyle McDonald, the members of the openFrameworks community, and to the many other open-source contributors who spend late nights tending to bugs, issues, and the maintenance of the creative coding toolkits that make this field possible. Thanks also to our many teaching role models in these communities: Dan Shiffman, for his profound public contributions as a new media arts educator; Taeyoon Choi and the School for Poetic Computation, for sharing a practice of institution building in its most compassionate form; and Chris Coleman of the University of Denver, whose new Clinic for Open Source Arts holds great promise for the continued support of our field.
This book was conceived at the 2013 Eyeo Festival Code+Education Summit. We wish to thank the directors of the Eyeo Festival—Jer Thorp, Dave Schroeder, Wes Grubbs, and Caitlin Rae Hargarten—for creating the conditions for this exchange and for gathering, galvanizing, and supporting our creative community. Similarly, we thank Filip Visnjic, former curator of the Resonate Festival and co-curator, with Greg J. Smith, of the CreativeApplications.net blog, which has provided such a tremendously valuable platform to bring the efforts of our community to a broader public.
This project was funded in part by ArtWorks grant #1855045–34–19 from the Media Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. We thank the NEA and its reviewers, and especially Media Arts Director Jax Deluca for her leadership in sharing these precious public funds. This book was also supported by a grant from the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier, administered by the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University; we express our deep gratitude to Edward H. Frank and Sarah Ratchye for their generosity. Additional support for this book was provided through graduate assistantships from the Integrative Digital Media program at the Tandon School of Engineering, New York University.
This book was realized through the logistical and administrative support of many dedicated staff at CMU's Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry: Thomas Hughes, Linda Hager, Carol Hernandez, and Bill Rodgers. We are also indebted to the staff of the CMU College of Fine Arts Sponsored Projects Office, Jenn Joy Wilson and January Johnson, for their assistance in bureaucratic wayfinding. We thank our student research assistants both at CMU and NYU: Sarah Keeling, who tirelessly compiled thousands of assignments from around the Web, and Najma Dawood-McCarthy, Chloé Desaulles, Cassidy Haney, Andrew Lau, Tatyana Mustakos, Cassie Scheirer, Xinyi (Joyce) Wang, and T. James Yurek, who helped us with many critical tasks including preparing and porting code samples, formatting citations, and securing image permissions.
We acknowledge that we are following in the footsteps of our peers, the fellow educators who have written excellent books on computer art and design education. These include John Maeda; Casey Reas and Ben Fry; Daniel Shiffman; Lauren McCarthy; Andrew Blauvelt and Koert van Mensvoort; Greg Borenstein; Andrew Glassner; Nikolaus Gradwohl; Ira Greenberg; Benedikt Groß, Hartmut Bohnacker, Julia Laub, and Claudius Lazzeroni; Carl Lostritto; Rune Madsen; Nick Montfort; Joshua Noble; Kostas Terzidis; Jan Vantomme; Mitchell Whitelaw; Mark Wilson; and Chandler McWilliams. Many of the exercises in this book were adapted from projects posted to the p5.js Web Editor and public online classrooms on the OpenProcessing.org repository, and so we are especially grateful to Cassie Tarakajian and Sinan Ascioglu, respectively, for creating and maintaining these critical community resources.
Thanks also to the many educators, students, and friends—a wider set of peers—who, knowingly or otherwise, contributed their creative energies to our volume, including: Alba G. Corral, Andreas Koller, Art Simon, Arthur Violy, Barton Poulson, Bea Alvarez, Ben Chun, Ben Norskov, Brian Lucid, Caitlin Morris, Caroline KZ, Cedric Kiefer, Charlotte Stiles, Chris Sugrue, Chris G. Todd, Christophe Lemaitre, Christopher Warnow, Claire Hentschker, Clement Valla, Connie Ye, Felix Worseck, Florian Jenett, Francisco Zamorano, Gabriel Dunne, Gene Kogan, Herbert Spencer, Hyeoncheol Kim, Isaac Muro, Joan Roca Gipuzkoa, Jeremy Rotsztain, Jim Roberts, Joey K. Lee, John Simon, Juan Patino, Juseung Stephen Lee, Kasper Kamperman, Kate Hollenbach, Kenneth Roraback, Lali Barriere, Lingdong Huang, Luiz Ernesto Merkle, Manolo Gamboa Naon, Marius Watz, Marty Altman, Matt Richard, Michael Kontopoulos, Monica Monin, Nick Fox-Gieg, Nick Senske, Nidhi Malhotra, Ozge Samanci, Paul Ruvolo, Pinar Yoldas, Rose Marshack, Ryan D’Orazi, Seb Lee-Delisle, Sheng-Fen Nik Chien, Stanislav Roudavski, Steffen Fiedler, Steffen Klaue, Tami Evnin, Thomas O. Fredericks, and Winterstein / Riekoff.
Finally, we thank our families, partners, and close friends, especially Andrea Boykowycz and Sam Lavigne, who have supported us with their feedback, encouragement, and unwavering patience throughout this seemingly never-ending project.