Fellowships 2023

Drawing upon Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the chorus in ‘Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments’, the piece surfaces “wayward” compositions that distort the colonial residue and remnants of empire in our ongoing struggle for collective liberation, as evidenced in the historical effigies of national freedom songs across the African diaspora, many still imbued with chauvinistic and patriarchal constructs. The piece is a computationally generated ensemble composed from 80+ anthems, protests, hymns and freedom songs from the diaspora. As a durational, non-linear, browser-based program presented in the form of an experimental film, it is infinitely playing, and resets at the beginning of every hour. The sound is composed from a living ethno-musicological archive Zai is assembling, and will continue to assemble, of afro-diasporic instruments across Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, and she leverages a variety of computational methods to defamiliarize the patriarchal constructs of their celebratory language; to alter them just enough to render them visible again.

‘The Data Garden Project’ is a growing resource and learning community for young women who want to build their first data visualisation artworks using Processing and p5.js.

Their mission is to build a resource for educators of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to introduce creative coding and data storytelling to their classrooms and communities. By embarking on a Data Garden Project, a young person is invited to find and gather data from their own lives—such as the food in their pantry, Spotify playlists, text messages, interactions with friends or family—and visualise it by learning the basics of creative coding and drawing using p5.js.

As a result, a young people discover how to create compelling and interactive data stories of who they are, using Processing as their data visualisation canvas and tool. Part coding class, part data “treasure hunt”, part collective journaling activity, this project invites young people (women especially) into a safe space of intimate storytelling, finding snippets of who they are and scrapbooking it into their own creative coded artworks to share with a supportive group of peers. She hopes that we may work towards a future where young women are given more opportunities to grow, not only so they can learn to code, but also that through coding, they may be equipped to rally community, to teach, to share their stories, and to lead.

This project proposes the formulation of a new ‘Access Fellowship,’ operating in tandem with other Processing fellowships but specifically aligned with the ongoing goals of promoting accessibility. Access Fellows would be responsible for proposing revisions to the Processing community access statements, contributing research, and engaging in special projects that highlight their unique perspectives and strategies of access.

Bobby Joe Smith and Nat Decker will collaboratively gather research material as a community resource and foundation for the iterative contributions of future access fellows. They propose that this repository of curated citations, syllabi, practical/technical strategies, and educational material about access be made available on the Processing and p5.js website, linked from the access statement. These resources can support ongoing organizational commitments and future revisions to the access statement.

Finally, they propose a collaboration with Qianqian Ye and others on a 2023 p5.js Access Day, using our research and community connections to inform a new iteration of speaker panels and workshops. This programming would generate space to build more access-centered community and resources, and experiment with some of the new ideas and pedagogical techniques they will develop to support the Access Fellowship. They hope to create a sustainable, robust, and deeply rooted program within the Processing Foundation capable of generating new understandings and implementations of accessibility. They wish to be informed and inspired by the diverse needs, skills, and desires of the Processing and p5.js communities. They hope to help the Processing Foundation and p5.js actualize their commitment to the liberatory practices of accessibility.

Kendra Krueger and Zahra Hassan are going to address the core issues of inaccessibility in today’s dominant science practices and point to alternatives of doing science otherwise. They move environmental practice to the center of our work as an interdisciplinary endeavor to unite different fields and collaboratively find solutions for a sustainable future. By employing the arts, humanities, and embodied practices, they are going to continue building these bridges and sharing their lessons with the world. In this vein, they are committed to developing an art-informed open-source teaching module for STEM that emphasizes non-extractive technologies. Such technologies move with the natural patterns and systems of the universe instead of disturbing, interrupting, or extracting them. With an emphasis on creating new tools for research and experimentation that help STEM practitioners and communities process information, we are foregrounding practices that are based on movement, meditation, improvisation, and employing data collection and pattern recognition through the body and the senses. As part of this teaching and learning module, they will focus on ways of leading classrooms and labs to a liberatory practice that is interdisciplinary, place-based, and acknowledges many knowledges as equally important to fight for a future that sustains the ecology. At the end of this process that includes workshops, exchanges, and case studies, they will create an open-source tool kit accessible through a website that includes how to address place-based knowledge (PBK) in everyday STEM practice.

Their goal is to build an inclusive STEM tool kit, an open-source learning tool to make STEM more accessible for learners and practitioners around the world. The aim of inclusive STEM pedagogy is to engage and uplift students from underrepresented backgrounds, effectively seeing themselves as future scholars and practitioners in the field. Their philosophy is rooted in understanding science through patterns, play, and the lens of storytelling. Approaching science through the lens of story is a method to make the sciences more accessible and invite various communities into these fields. By employing artistic practice, ancestral modes of storytelling, and tools borrowed from various fields and practices such as ‘Theater of the Oppressed’, this pedagogy seeks to reach a broad variety of communities, spark curiosity and enthusiasm for STEM, and make people move closer to a multiplicity of science approaches.

‘CodeSurfing (CLB Lướt Code)’ is a backyard-science club for Vietnamese to study machine learning through p5.js. The club connects Ho Chi Minh City’s creative community with local young students to make impactful designs for the coastal environment of Vietnam. ‘CodeSurfing (CLB Lướt Code)’ is a backyard science club in Vietnam that focuses on studying machine learning through p5.js. The club aims to teach artists, designers, and engineers how to use programming for their creative pursuits, enabling them to create impactful designs for the local environment.

This is the first step toward building a p5.js community in Vietnam. In 2024, CodeSurfing plans to run a summer camp to connect the creative community of Ho Chi Minh City with local young students in Binh Thuan. They will teach high school students to program and together design applications to alleviate the effects of climate change in the area.

CodeSurfing hopes to make a lasting impact on the Vietnamese youth community and coastal environment through education and technology. The Earth is getting hotter and so is the creative scene in Saigon. Nhan hopes this young community can code as intense as the beat of Vinahouse, up-tempo the whole scene, break free from social norms, from the shadows of warfare, from the overwhelm of superficial visual and head to a new dynamic spectrum where their works can bridge across domains, reach beyond boundaries, and transform the community that we are living in collectively.

Olivia McKayla Ross and Kelly Chen view performance as a system that can be modified, adapted, and reconfigured, creating a dialogue between the performer and the audience and blurring the boundaries between the two. For their proposal for the Processing Teaching Fellowship, they’re developing ‘CYBERNETIC THEATER COMPANY-IN-A-BOX’, a collection of performance scores, drama games, and other curriculum materials for youth that expand what we commonly imagine when we think of “open-source software arts education.”

They are looking to combine creative coding with experimental theater, in order to challenge the notion of computer science education as the development of functions, products, and applications motivated by capital and privatization. Many AP Computer Science students can achieve perfect scores on the exam without understanding fundamental ideas in computing, like computer memory, the graphics processing pipeline, computer networks, file systems, and data representation. However, exploring the implications and significance of these concepts sheds light on the design of our networked society. How can Processing’s open source tools and drama-based learning help youth navigate these concepts for (potentially) the first time? It allows students to envision programming as a part of their daily world and as a creative tool, rather than just software and hardware that they are subject to.

They view the Cybernetic Opera Company as a “test kitchen” for critical research and connection between electronics and performance, and a gateway for new models of engagement with open source arts. They hope that their summer fellowship with the Processing Foundation can help lay the groundwork for this new curriculum. Kelly Chen hopes to work with youth with a range of familiarity with computer science, theater, and critical theory, and to see how they interact with technology in their everyday lives. Olivia and Kelly hope that instead of pressuring to integrate the already abstracted language of computer science into the arts, they can bring out the ways in which computational concepts already exist in our everyday movements and how performing those movements can be a kind of art.

Liam Baum (he/him) is a musician, educator and creative coder. He is a music teacher at BELL Academy, a public middle school in Bayside, Queens. He recently got his NY State Teaching Certification in Computer Science from Hunter College. Liam is constantly exploring how technology can be used for the purpose of creative artistic expression both in his classroom and personal artistic endeavors. This has led him to collaborate with CS4All in the NYC Department of Education to assist building curriculum for creative coding with the p5.js Sound Library and to become a teacher ambassador for Makey Makey. He enjoys merging his passions for music, teaching, and coding by making video tutorials and leading workshops around the NYC area. He also occasionally performs live coded music under the name, ‘Mister Bomb’.

Liam is a strong believer in the importance of artistic communities as a way to foster his own creative growth and in turn, contribute to teaching and inspiring others to do the same. He has been involved with several music and technology-based groups around the NYC area and virtually including the Creative Coding Fest, Processing Foundation, LiveCode.NYC, Code/Art, Hip Hop Hacks, Monthly Music Hackathons, and Maker Music Festival. His work is available at www.youtube.com/mrbombmusic and https://github.com/mrbombmusic

Stephanie T. Jones is broadly interested in thinking about the role of AI in replicating and producing Black death, and the potential use of AI in projects of Black Life. During the Processing Fellowship, they will be producing a syllabus entitled, ‘Black Life in the Age of AI.’ This syllabus will contain multi-media approaches, from research articles, news publications, to podcasts, art, and videos. As a part of this work, they will have an AI and Black Life Art Gallery hosted on the site. This will be filled by accepting submissions from those who partake in the syllabus and seeded by the art they produce while designing this syllabus. This site is meant to be accessible not only in designing with disabled people in mind but also in terms of free content and having a variety of ways to engage in the topic. In addition to this, they will conduct interviews with prominent Black thinkers within the AI community. These interviews entitled, ‘Meditations on AI’, will invite participants to reflect and share their thoughts. In addition to this, it is important for us to reconsider narratives around fear, towards narratives of possibility, when building these systems. They hope to build community with others interested in this work and help shift imaginaries on possibility for AI.