When I was a tween I had a tumblr blog in which I poured most of my free hours, I used to review the HTML code and add things like a cute menu, a cool cursor and of course a curated playlist with all the songs I was listening at the moment.
Of course the contents of the blog changed as my interests did (and they were many since I kept it dutifully updated for around two years), but the coding aspect of it was a constant thing I faced and enjoyed. And it brought a lot of great things to my life, I had a full set of friends that I had met and bonded with thanks to the blog, but at some point, I stopped using it. Probably didn’t seemed as interesting as I was already a full teenager with a lot more autonomy to go out most days and hang out with friends in places other than the internet.
However, a couple of years into my Arts bachelor’s I entered a classed called “Programming”, given by an artist and teacher at the Arts Faculty (Also, an ITP alumni). I was — at the time — way more interested in physical things such as sculpture, but this class opened my desired field of work in ways I couldn’t imagine before.
So, I was re-encountered with code as an adult and confronted with a vastness that I didn’t notice before. One of the reasons I applied to ITP and decided to follow this path of learning is to learn to code in a way that can allow me to do structures, mechanisms and tools that interact with people. And I know now that this is mostly achieved through code.
I love robotic artworks such as “Can’t Help Myself” by Su Yuan and Peng Yu and The Telegarden. Maybe not in this term, but one of the goal projects I have for this couple of years is a robotic arm that reads pretty much as the child of the two projects mentioned before. I imagine it as a robot that makes flower arrangements, that is able to recognize and select flowers, and I wish to write the code myself.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about a ping pong table that produces sounds whenever the ball touches the surface. I have a lot of ideas, most of them probably won’t get made, but the process of imagining new things and the constant practice of this makes me better as an artist, even better as a person (I wholeheartedly believe it!!! Imagination is so nutritive to the very soul). And what is computing if not a whole new realm that can only expand my imaginative landscape, a new field that has brought into my life a lot of new people as well, that I hope to meet and learn from as these two years go by.
P.S
From this first exercise, I didn’t struggle too much until I was finishing up my self-portrait. I wanted to use an arc for my bangs but couldn’t figure out how to precisely and intentionally determinate the range that would be shown. I tried with different numbers until it came somewhat similar to what I hoped to get, but couldn’t really understand the logic behind the angles, how they work and how to use in them to get the image that I envision in my head. With Github, I struggle a bit but only because it is new to me, I’m sure I’ll figure it out quickly enough. Thanks for all the guidance, see you on class :-)