An emerging group of NC State students with a love of both STEM and the arts are looking to introduce their craft to the community at an exhibition this Friday.
The Creative Coding Collective is one of NC State’s newest clubs, with this semester being its first. As the name may suggest, their main goal is to utilize coding in order to create stunning, moving works of art.
“I knew other people were interested in this sort of thing, so I decided to start a group where people could come and produce art using code, whether it’s visual, textual or some other thing,” said Justin Kuhn, a fourth-year studying electrical engineering and art studies and the group’s current president. “My experience with art is that people tend to put art in a box as something separate from STEM. We usually think of as art, such as something hanging on a wall, or something you walk through, something with an existing form. Our goals are along the lines of experimentalism, where we’re trying to figure out new ways to combine different fields to produce new and exciting things, whether they have meaning to them or are more abstract, and are just overall trying to mess with everyone’s expectations.”
Along with creating their own audio visualizations, the group also seeks to help introduce coding to anyone unfamiliar with it, and have worked to provide tools and tips to help its members learn about the field.
“We’ve found a lot of great tools to share with our members, and we’ve used them during meeting to help work on our skills,” said David Storelli, a fourth-year studying electrical engineering and the current vice president of the group. “One of the largest resources we utilized was NCSU’s own libraries. They have a lot of great tools for creative coding and for virtual reality. We were even able to have our mentor come in to do a workshop on how to create audio visualizations.”
Although their field is still working to find its footing in both the art and STEM worlds, the Creative Coding Collective hopes to help it realize its full potential.
“Creative coding is really an emerging field right now, so we’re really hoping to spread awareness about it, so that people seeing our work can feel inspired to do something on their own,” Storelli said. “There’s a wealth of information about coding out there, and we’d like to let people know that it’s available to them.”
The group’s main project for this semester is an exhibition to be held in the Gregg Museum of Art & Design on Friday at 5:30 p.m. Structured like a performance, this will be the group’s first official showcase of its work.
“During the event, we’ll have our members come up and present their visualizations, as well as the accompanying audio,” Storelli said. “We also have collaborations between people who specialize in the visual side and those who specialize in audio, so the event will be like a concert with some nice audio visuals in the background.”
The event’s theme is rooted in the group’s introduction of itself to the campus community. Each piece presented will be uniquely crafted to represent the coders and artists that created them.
“I wanted it to be as open as possible,” Kuhn said. “Since this is our first performance, I wanted people to be able to take their existing skills and talents and be able to digitize that. Some people play instruments, some people do digital art or graphic design, and so usually code is a level of abstraction on top of an existing art form.”
After Friday’s event, the group is looking into doing a performance in Hunt Library, specifically in their Teaching and Visualization lab, as well as potentially working to put their skills towards virtual reality installations. With the hopeful success of their upcoming presentation, NC State will be able to look forward to more of what this group has to offer.
