PITTSBURGH, PA –  I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to Chicago and then home to Vancouver. I spent the past four days in Pittsburgh for the Art and Code Symposium at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). To paraphrase the words of Golan Levin, organizer of the event and director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry @ CMU, the conference was a gathering to workshop and discuss programming tools designed for artists, young people, and the rest of us.

It was a conference focused on the computer as a means for creativity as opposed to simple utility, evolving the computer from efficient tool to artistic medium.

Presenting at the conference were the thought leaders of this vibrant community. The founding developers of Processing, openFrameworks, VVVV, Hackety Hack, Alice, and Scratch along with leading educators and researchers taught workshops and presented their platforms.

I attended the ActionScript workshop by Ira Greenberg, the author of Creative Computer Coding, Daniel Shiffman's Advanced Processing Workshop, and“hello world” workshops for openFrameworks and PureData. It was intense and exhilarating and exhausting and profoundly inspiring.

Emphasis throughout was placed on computer literacy as apposed to simply computer proficiency. Just as literacy in the context of language does not simply mean that a person can speak but that they can read and write - express themselves. So too, computer literacy should mean that we don’t just know how to use the computer to get things done but to create new software. To use the computer as a means in fulfilling the will to self-expression, no different than using language to write. With that mindset, there was a persistent distinction between computer science and programming and the importance of breaking down the barrier to programming amongst non-computer scientists.

Personally, I owe Daniel Shiffman a beer or two for the work that he has done to break down that barrier. It was his book, Learning Processing, that I devoutly pored over during winter break, only a couple of months ago; it gave me the confidence to tackle programming and break down the barrier 'line of code by line of code'.  Check out Daniel's recent blog post about the conferece.

Other than the obvious rough and tumble technical learning that comes from intense workshops, the most valuable take away was the sense of community and passion that percolated throughout the weekend. Nothing exemplifies this more than the fact that the majority of the platforms are entirely opensource and non-commercial. It is this spirit of openness and collaboration and sharing which is the foundation of creation and innovation in this field. The essence is synthesis; the synthesis of the artistic and the technical in both mindset and form.

Unlike the capitalist market place where IP and privacy are the foundations of innovation, in this atmosphere it felt like people were competing for openness. The more they give away the taller they stand.

This shift in perspective owes itself to a few factors. Firstly, the development of many of these tools comes from the academic world, namely MIT, NYU and CMU. It is within the academic environment that developers are released from corporate expectation and are encouraged to freely disseminate their programs.

Additionally, these toolkits are developed by small core groups of people. Processing was developed by a team of two, Ben Fry and Casey Reas, of hundreds of developers, making the process cheaper and more sustainable.

But, most central to the success of these endevours are the communities that have evolved around them. Hundreds of people, all volunteers, write libraries to extend the features of these programs, answer questions in forums and share their code with others. And the true success of these platforms lies not in the technology, per se, but the communities they build and foster.

At a closing panel on the development of new tools, Zachary Lieberman, a founding developer of openFrameworks, stressed the importance and necessity of social interaction in the development of these platforms and in education.  In the openFrameworks community, social gathering in computing manifests in the organization of programming ‘knitting circles’ where people get together and jam with code.

On Sunday night we held a conference specific ‘open mike -Dorkbot – Pecha Kucha’ hybrid where people presented their various projects and experiments. I took the mike and proudly shared one of our projects from last semester, Fluxus – the art of conversation; I not only demoed the virtual conversation space we designed, but also showed some photos from the Midforms Festival where Fluxus was on display. My final slide captured two avatars inside each other creating art; the perfect image to represent my experience at Art and Code where 200 people from all over the world got together to talk about creating art with code and the art of coding. I eagerly anticipate next year.

Ryan Nadel is a first year student in the MDM program.