Opening Talk
The opening talk will be given by Kiwako Sakamoto.
Lightning Talks
Writing code at the speed of thought! Or voice! Or dance?
Some programmers tend to focus on optimising everything, so that they can get a little closer to the speeds at which their beloved machines operate. That’s how we got, among others, modal text editors! Which resulted in editing itself becoming kind of a language for expressing changes to a piece of text. Which kind of makes you think, does it have to be just a written language? In this talk, I’ll share my experiences in implementing a modal text editor plugin for the ultimately hackable Atom editor, and how it brought me to thinking beyond keyboard input to silly ideas like dancing in front of a computer.
So, you have decided to become a Creative Technologist..!
If you have already decided and are motivated to delve into the amazing world of computer arts, as a Creative Technologist or Coder, let me introduce you to some real-life tools and workflows that you will probably be using.
But first, we will be taking a look back at the technical stack of the first computer graphics artist, all the way to the 1960, and also at some algorithmic but non-computer-based artwork that shaped some of the design and programming tools of today.
I will be describing the various languages and frameworks available, since it’s important to understand the kind of mind and workflow they propose for working with images, sound and interactivity. These can range from C++ standalone applications, to web frameworks, to electronic prototyping platforms. Last but not least, I will be describing some best practices when engaging in the setup of interactive installations at a professional level.
As an artist and educator in the field of Electronic Arts, I believe that providing and introducing the tools and workflows, as well as a context for the future projection of your own work, is as essential as the prior enthusiasm you can have. This is important to overcome the frustration you might encounter when approaching a totally new field of interest, especially one that will ask you to constantly juggle your creative and technical abilities.
Cause, trouble and fun of time
Passage of time is eternal. Its measurement is not, but it’s so integrated into our lives we rarely think about it… Until we struggle with a time related bug. Probably every programmer will tell measuring time is a challenge. And it is for a reason! I will talk briefly about what causes that (astronomy!) and various human- and computer- oriented solutions used over the years.
How AI is enhancing journalism
From war zone reporter bots to social listening tools, artificial intelligence and machine learning practices have crept their way into newsrooms. This talk will explore some of the ways these technologies are used in modern journalism and touch on what’s coming next.
How I re-discovered my joy for programming through creative computing
I think that deep inside, people always have something they feel really passionate about. Some people like myself even feel passionate about two or three different things. For me it has always been art and computers. Sometimes is difficult to keep up with doing the things you love, specially when time is limited and one does not see a clear way to combine them. This spring I had the opportunity to attend a programming retreat in Brooklyn. My original plan was to work in one of my programming toy projects: a functional programming language. Instead, I was introduced to the wonderful world of creative computation and generative art. This changed the way I thought of technology ever since. I would like to talk about how excited I feel about being able to reconcile my passion for arts with my passion for computers. During this talk, the audience will be given a motivation and will be briefly introduced to the idea of creative computation, and to some of the tools that can be used to explore these topics. I personally feel very enthusiastic about this field. I believe this trend allows technology to be used as a tool to create beauty, as well as a means of expression, and as a positive force for society, through arts and creativity.
ptrace: The Sherlock Holmes of syscalls!
Ever wondered what happens when you ask the debugger to set a breakpoint at line 5? Or how strace allows you to be a debugging wizard without using the debugger or the source?! In this talk, we’ll talk about ptrace, the linux syscall which gives the debugger, strace and many other tools their magical powers!
Lo-fi Augmented Reality
How do human testers react when their point of view, usually closely linked to their heads, becomes technologically multiplied and spread over their bodies? is one of the questions I work with in my experimental research project about lo-fi Augmented Reality. I build DIY perception modifiers that open AR to multi species visions by using Raspberry Pis, Web VR, smartphones and spiders. When binocular human vision isn’t the default, current definitions of Augmented Reality can be challenged and extended. Applications range from full body suits and small python scripts to custom shaders in the game engine Unity. Through this contribution, I hope to share some of the excitements and possibilities lo-fi Augmented Reality offers and how you can get started.
A shell that shouts at you
It all started with a joke tweet and a reply asking for a shouting program. Turns out it takes just a few lines of Rust to turn every text into a SHOUTING TEXT!!!1!. It’s a bit more code to turn that into every program’s default behavior.
With some tricky file descriptor redirection, forking a program and preloading it before every other program, we can turn everyone’s precious stdout into the shouting machine you always wanted.
This talk will give you a quick tour through parts of Linux behavior you will probably not need too often and encourage you to occasionally give even your silliest ideas a go (as even those can teach you a lot). This talk will NOT involve shouting on stage.
The Wikidata Query Interface: The world’s knowledge at your fingertips
Wikidata is a community project with the goal to store all of the world’s knowledge in a machine readable format. This data can be viewed, edited and -most excitingly - queried by everyone. In this talk I will show how the Wikidata Query Interface allows us to ask questions about the world around us and can help us explore these with automatic interactive visualisations.
To do so, I will introduce the Wikidata project and explain how data is modelled in it. With this knowledge we will go on to learn about the SPARQL query language which allows us to write queries to Wikidata. We can then use the Wikidata Query Builder which is an online interface that turns queries into timelines, tables and other interactively explorable visualisations.
What kinds of queries can we expect? The world’s biggest cities with a female mayor. A map of German election districts coloured by winning party (or gender, or age, …). An interactive timeline of politicians who became federal ministers. Handball player nick names… (Almost) everything is possible with Wikidata!
LilyPond: programming beautiful musical scores
LilyPond is a musical typesetting program. While it aims to produce beautiful scores by default, its output is also extensively configurable and programmable. This makes it an attractive hobby for people at the intersection of programming and music, some of whom I hope to captivate with this talk.
Start With Just a Few Things
In 1960, the computer scientist John McCarthy published a paper titled “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation By Machine.” The paper describes a language called Lisp. In 1967, the painter Philip Guston abandoned abstract expressionism, a style of painting for which he was famous, and began to work on something new. It is doubtful that these two influenced one another, and yet there is a similar way of thinking in their work. This talk explains McCarthy’s classic paper by analogy to Guston’s paintings.
An Introduction to APL
APL (which stands for “A Programming Language”) has been around for ages. It’s based on mathematical notation devised in 1957, and first implemented in 1962. Mostly known for its use of idiosyncratic, untypeable characters, it survives today holding together the infrastructure of large banks, among other tasks. It has some unique and fascinating features, and has spawned a family of similar languages. In “An Introduction to APL”, I hope to introduce you to this language, make an example less intimidating, and show you some of the surrounding, modern-day culture.
💩.la?!? the fascinating history and current state of IDNs!!
When the World Wide Web launched in 1991, all the domain names on the internet were limited to letters, numbers and dashes. Which was a good start, sure, but what about other languages? In 1996, the first proposal for Internationalization of Domain Names were published. The next years were full of experiments, refinements, and eventually we’d arrive at what we have today: being able to register мiсrоsoft.com to phish people and 💩.la for vanity. But also, a lot of countries and cultures are now able to have domains in their own languages. How did we get here? Where are we now? And how does punycode work, anyway?
Abstractions! How do I even?
All we ever build when we create software is abstractions—layers upon layers of stuff to hide the stuff we don’t find as aesthetically pleasing or usable underneath. This is a useful activity, but not necessarily one that take a lot of time studying as technologists.
There is one profession, however, that has been trying to study, separate, and generally figure out abstractions: philosophers! In this talk, we’re going to see what exciting, funny, sad, and mind-boggling insights some philosophers and authors have for us, and how we can add those to our mindset to build better abstractions, without having to read thousands of pages full of labyrinthine sentences that you need a map and a PhD for1!
Ideally, you’d walk away from this talk inspired and intellectually tickled, though I won’t pass up on pure entertainment, either! If I can show you that thinking hard about abstractions can be fun rather than dull then I’ve fulfilled all of my goals!
1: Though I’ll give you a reference/reading list at the end, if decyphering obscure texts is your sort of thing!