Casey Reas
June 2020
When I was first learning to code, this book would have made a world of difference. I had been trying to learn for three years on and off—on my own and then through an evening extension class in 1997—and there were no resources I knew of at that time that were devoted to coding through the visual arts. My class only provided examples and exercises in the domains of math and text. (My final assignment was to make an accounting system for a fictional bank.) It was a challenge and a chore, but I knew I needed programming skills to make what I wanted to make.
Outside of class, when I finally knew enough C to start making visual things, everything changed. My motivation kicked in and I learned more in a few weeks than I had learned in months prior. The resulting collection of cryptic experiments called Reactive 006 opened the door for me to join John Maeda's Aesthetics + Computation Group (ACG) at the MIT Media Lab in 1999. The ACG was the place I had been looking for. As a small research group, it brought together a wide range of artists, designers, and coders to explore a new kind of synthesis between those domains. Some of those early experiments evolved into the initial set of examples for Processing 1.0, which Ben Fry and I released in 2001. My two years in ACG clarified my future and led to my first experiences teaching code.
As I discovered firsthand, the teaching style for learning to code within computer science rarely worked for visual arts students, so those of us who taught visual artists and designers invented new approaches to immerse students in this way of thinking and making. This meant breaking the existing teaching methods apart and building them again in new ways. Starting with the exercises in John Maeda's Design By Numbers book, I made guesses about what might work in my classroom and then slowly improved the curriculum year by year by adding and removing assignments while figuring out the balance between code and ideas. I compared notes with others and, over time, something very different from the original computer science curriculum emerged.
The first Eyeo Festival in 2011 was a pivotal moment in this story, when a loose online network of artists, designers, educators, and technologists converged in Minneapolis to meet in person for the first time. The 2013 festival supported the first “Code+Ed” summit, which brought together a large group of committed educators. Tega and Golan both participated in this full day of sharing and recording new ideas for a creative coding curriculum, and it was where they began to research and collect the teaching techniques and strategies of hundreds of educators. This book is the first to collect this community's wisdom in one place, to better share it with new generations of instructors.
Great artworks get remembered, but not the humble methods of artist training. Our collective online courses are fragile, with more and more of that material lost month by month as URLs and servers change. This book is important in the same way that Johannes Itten's Design and Form opened a window into Bauhaus pedagogy. It preserves assignments and exercises at this moment of transition in arts education when we're all collectively trying to figure it out.
Like many others then and now, I first learned to code through reading books; yet all books about coding grapple with which language to use. Python, Java, C++, Javascript? Any choice excludes groups of educators and learners and narrows the audience. Tega and Golan have addressed this dilemma by making Code as Creative Medium language-agnostic—it smartly doesn't include code within the book. This decision has allowed them to focus on higher-level concepts related to code and the arts, without the requirements of explaining coding fundamentals. Subjects like color, drawing, landscapes, and self-portraits become the primary axes and technical topics like variables, functions, and arrays are secondary. This is an important and exciting reversal. How refreshing to have a creative coding book that won't quickly become obsolete!
How can we engage “creative people” with the strange way of writing that is code? How can we engage “code people” with a sophisticated visual arts curriculum? Code as Creative Medium tackles these difficult questions by curating over 30 years of exploration in visual arts education. It not only offers guidance on new ways to involve students; instructors will find themselves challenged and inspired as well. I've taught visual arts students for two decades and I learned something new on every page of this book. There's enough material here to build curricula for multiple, diverse courses. In addition, it can be used for teaching a weekend workshop, to build a creative coding module for high school students, or to seed a new certificate program. It is an essential resource for a rapidly evolving field.
Thank you, Tega and Golan, for such a thoughtful and generous gift to our expanding community. I'm amazed at how far we've come in the last twenty years. With this book as our guide, we can travel so much further. Onward!