sketchPatch blog

• 2012-10-28

  Creative Coding at Lambeth Academy

  This April sketchPatch delivered the second of it’s Creative Coding Workshops forGenerating Genius at Lambeth Academy. 

  Over the three days the students learned some of the basic principles of coding, and used it as a creative tool to develop art work and interactive animations.

  For most of the students this was the first time they had ever used computer code, but the standard of the work produced was fantastic. 

  D'mitri adapted projects from the online learning websites, Processing.js, to accomplish her ideas. 

  It’s amazing how much inspiring and totally unexpected art work is created every time we run these workshops. :)

  Lukas aka Lukasrygh with his series of pieces Perspective_trick1, 2 & 3. He impressed the judges with his understanding of code, and his focus on how to manipulate the code to produce a desired visual outcome.

   

  Shanice Cameron-Richards, aka ni3cey, with her piece Tropical Space, inspired by her love of all things tropical, and outer space. 

  Ni3cey: Tropical space

  Here are some of the brilliant projects that came out of the workshops at Lambeth Academy…

  Conor_Mcevoy1998: Curtain CallKaiHaseley: boxes (epileptic warning)CrystalJadeNwa: Feed The Panda

  Khoa100027: Germ invadersreubenWilliamson: Forever Raining - Black backgroundNjsamzous: Spawning Galaxy

  
  kobena: SimplexityPromiseWilliams2012: No ControlKamaucbp: syco display

  The sketchPatch Creative Coding workshops were delivered in partnership with Lambeth Academy and…

   and were sponsored by  

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  sketchPatch Creative Coding Workshops

  This February (2012) sketchPatch partnered up with Generating Genius to deliver our 3Day Creative Coding workshop and Expo to young people at Crossways Sixth Form College. 

  We spent three days working with the students to explore the basics of computer programming and developing projects in a creative context.

  
  

  At the end of the workshop we printed out the final pieces onto A1 posters, and the students presented their work in a poster presentation style Expo to members of their family, school faculty and special guests. 

  The students produced  amazing pieces of generative art inspired by their own imagination, and other projects on the sketchPatch website. 

  
  

  The project involved a competition, with judges from sketchPatch, Generating Genius and Google marking the final projects on creativity and understanding and use of code.  Everyone contributed amazing new artworks, some original, some modified from projects on the site. The competition winners were…

  In joint second place:

  Yusuf Yusuf  and Lamin Sodiya

   

  .

  In first place: Samiat Kolawole who is now sketchPatch’s latestFeatured Sketcher. 

  Her Final Project can be seen here.  Samiat’s inspiration came from a science theme, which lead to an exploration of the solar system. The rotating sun connotes the solar orbits, and also identifies the empty space. 

  
  

  Over the three days she gained an understanding and knowledge of how to code, “a little mistake can cause your work to collapse, however if you do it to perfection it will always create a unique and outstanding creative idea." 

   

  The sketchPatch Creative Coding workshops were delivered in partnership with Crossways Sixth Form College and…

  and were sponsored by 

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  sketchPatch workshop @ V&A - 16th - 17th July

  We must be doing something right! Our 3rd workshop for the V&A. They must enjoy is as much as we do :) 

  This will be a drop-in session, so please come down and say hi, have a tinker and play around with what everyone is up to. It’s great when people version each others work throughout the day. Come and start something off and see how it has evolved by the end of the day. And, as always, print out your sketch and make a badge.

  By then we should have our next Featured Artist on the site, but mums the word for now! ;)

  Hope to see you there!

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  Busy busy!

  Well, we have been busy here at sketchPatch, not even had the time blog about all the stuff we’ve been up to since last year! slack or wot!

  So here is a quick update of our recent activities…

  • We exibited in the acclaimed exhibition Unleashed Devices at Watermans Gallery, curated by TINT Art and Irini Papadimitriou from 1st September to 28th October 2010. Very honored to be part of such an exciting exhibition of digital art. We travelled there in style for the opening on the London Dorkbotboat!
  • sketchPatch exhibited in London Design Festival, as part of the Victoria & Albert (V&A) Digital Week, 25th September 2010. :) We were very excited about that. It was great fun, and we met some great people with great projects. A couple of people who hadn’t heard of us before, like us so much they came along to our workshop the following week at [ space ]
  • MzTEK sketchPatch workshop. MzTEK is a great project :) well worth it’s weight in gold!
  • We had the great pleasure of running a workshop at the V&A - TWICE!  for their Youth Arts Festival. Once on the 20th Nov 2010 and again on 5th March 2011. Theses were really fun sessions designing yet more badges, only bigger! Sophie ran these workshop with the help of our old sketchPatch buddy, Julie Freeman.
  • We took part in the Family Day Festival at Digital Shoreditch on May 7th 2011.  We managed to borrow some computers for the day from [ space ] so a very big THANK YOU to them! We chatted to some nice peeps, ate someMzTEK cakes, they are raising money for a project called Chi-TEK (geeks), and then we made a few more badges.

  Ah, thats more than i thought. I’ll try and keep up from now on, and put in some pretty pictures and that.

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  Big Chill chillin'

  Next sP adventure is to take our badge making skills toSwap Meet tent at the Big Chill Festival in Eastnor Castle Deer Park, Herefordshire, August 5th - 8th 2010.
  
  http://www.bigchill.net/festival/line-up/swap-meet

  We will be sharing the tent with our Dorkbot Londonfriends and MzTEK. Fun & games include

  sketchPatch badge making,

  light up your rists, MzTEK will be

  wiring up bangles

  with LEDs, they (and me) will be stitichin’, it’ll be bitchin’! and Julie will be making some

  home made flying moths!

  plus more…
  
  so

  heaps

  of creative

  techi fun

  and games to keep you busy of a

  sunny

  /rainy afternoon.

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  sketchPatch as far as Umea…

  Earlier this month sketchPatch went about as far north as you can get to take part in the Open Source Embroidery Exhibition. (6th June - 6th Sept)

  Its a really interesting exhibition that includes work and projects exploring“participatory production and distribution methods.”

  
  

  I got the opportunity to introduce the site to people personally which was cool.  It was great to see people could really quickly get making basic shapes and animations. :o)

  Umea is a town in Sweden about 8hrs by train north of Stockholm, and has 24hr daylight/twilight! Its a really weird feeling. Check this out, us after the exhibition opening around a fire at about midnight…

  no flash!

  and this is a v friendly (and possibly blind) hedgehog that smelt the cheese…

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  sketchPatch schools workshop with the Barbican

  As you may know, if you have come here through the sP website, this June/July we have had great fun working with the the wonderful people at the Barbican to deliver sP workshops to the wonderful pupils of City of London Academy Islingtonand Oaklands School in Bethnal Green.
  
  We worked together to create some stunning pieces of interactive visual art, that we then turned into beautiful, unique, wearable art… i.e. badges! (beacuse everybody loves badges!:o)
  
  I worked alongside Ric Carvalho and Julie Freeman to deliver about 25 workshops, to over 200 pupils!  It was an intense week, but so worth it!
  
  sP’s aim from the start was to provide a fun environment that demystifies code (traditionally kept at the ‘back end’ of a piece of work), is easily accessible to everyone and allows a platform for collaboration.  So the workshop felt like a an opportunity to test that out, and it worked out really well. We used the 'hint?’ link from the 'write a sketch’ page to quickly introduce the code, it was only an hour long workshop and half was taken up by badge making, but we had enough time to talk about different functions and changing variables, and to get some stunning results. The progress of the pupils, who were mostly newbies, was surprisingly advanced. You can take a look for yourself by visiting their Featured Sketchers page here and following the links to each groups sketches.

  The project has inspired us to seek other educational outreach projects, so keep an eye out for future sP fun!

  

  CoLA Islington Arts Fest on sketchPatch.net from Sophie McDonald on Vimeo.

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  sketchTennis - featuring: slub

  Introducing sketchPatch’s new game… sketchTennis - featuring slub!!!!!
  
  For the whole of June, slub will be playing sketch tennis online here at sketchPatch for your coding delight.  They will be writing new and inspired sketches, and bouncing them between each other to adopt, adapt, mutate and create new versions, all while we watch on in awe as we see evolution in process before our very eyes.
  
  slub are three live coders, Alex McLean, Dave Griffiths and Adrian Ward, a process-based sonic improvisations trio that perform live generative music using hand-crafted Unix applications, in networked synchrony. 
  
  

  
  slub’s sound emerges from slub software; melodic and chordal studies, generative experiments and beat processes.  With roots in UK electronica and tech culture, slub build their own software environments for creating music in realtime, and have made software to make music and visuals to drink beer to for the last nine years.http://slub.org/
  
  For the month of June slub will be channeling their coding creativity into visual sketches online at sketchPatch.net using the Processing programming language, so don’t be shy, join the match!

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  Meet featured artist Kim Asendorf

  Happy and proud to present this season’s featured sketcher: Kim Asendorf

  Kim is a Bremen-born artist currently based in Kassel.

  His production spans creative coding, live performance, photography and video, and it is at the same time high-tech, variegated, daring, and, as if it wasn’t enough, it’s *vast*.

  Kim is “high-tech” in the sense that he doesn’t shy away from trying out obscure processing libraries or build his own (in fact, he built at least two).

  “Variegated” as in: whatever work of his you are watching, you’ve never seemanything quite like it, even within his own portfolio. “Daring” as in he is not afraid to upset the viewer.

  And let’s talk about the vastness. By “vast” we don’t just mean “a stack of unedited work”. We mean a serious lot of *selected* pieces, as in: 63 flickr sets in less than one year, 15 full-fledged projects (featured on two personal sites in addition to a number of satellite social media sites), the breath of each project leaves us dizzy too.

   

  Take a glimpse of Kim’s portfolio on flickr and make sure to subscribe to his feeds - and brace yourself for the storm of works he is going to unleash next!

  Source: sketchpatch.net

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  Meet featured artist Ricardo Carvalho

  As some of you might have spotted already, we are proud to welcome our second featured sketcher on the sketchPatch site: Ricardo Carvalho.

  Ricardo is an artist working on interactive installations which question the spectator’s physical, political and biological conditions in relation to the urban enviroment they inhabit. Recently he has started incorporating physical computing and computer vision into his work as a means of generating original poetic manifestations by exploiting these new emerging technologies, as well as creating new platforms for social interaction and change. He is currently studying on the MFA Computational Arts programme at Goldsmiths University.
  
  You can check out his sketches here: http://www.sketchpatch.net/FS_Ric.html , and see more of Ricardo’s work at his wicked site: http://www.sertik.com

  Source: sketchpatch.net