Hack n Chat Maker Party in Dundee

Mozilla

Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) sounds like an amazing place. It’s a world-class center in Scotland dedicated to the development and exhibition of contemporary art and culture. They’ve got exhibitions, they run workshops, they screen films…and they’ve just thrown an incredibly cool Hack n Chat event as part of the global Maker Party.


The DCA’s Hack n Chat, sponsored by the School of Computing at Dundee University, began with presentations by several artists, musicians, scientists and coders. A fascination range of topics was explored, including:

  • The relationships between computers and creativity. This discussion resulted in an interesting question: Is code a medium or tool?
  • Processing, a programming language, development environment and online community that promotes software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology.
  • Open technology and how it can result in the rapid realization of creative ideas.
  • The challenges of visualizing the human genome for public engagement.
  • Big Data and the issues surrounding moving and storing the vast amount of data being produced in the fields of commerce and science.
  • The pervasive nature of code across various disciplines and how it relates to the surging interest in programming around the world.

And that was all before lunch! After attendees dined on pizza, they broke into small groups to tackle the challenge of producing something Processing-shaped in less than two hours.
As @sspog, one of the presenters, describes in his blog about the event:
The outputs were as broad as they were interesting. One group produced a range of optical illusions with different arrangements of colours and shapes to trick the eye. Another group pulled a track from Spotify and produced a orbiting particle-system visualisation which reacted dynamically to the audio. We had animated scenes, interactive genes, a dynamic 3D model of chromosome 21. Roy (who had to leave early) mailed in a random potato generator. Last but not least we managed to sneak in a little #arduino with a visualisation seeded – literally – by (conductive) paint drying.
Here are a few of the Hack n Chat Makes. Click on the images to explore.

 

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