Week 84 & 85
CC Santè 2024, practical design thinking, active learning, notorious AI usage and MARS College.
[Reflections] CC Santè 2024
Last weekend, I was in Bangalore for the CCSantè Community Conference. I gave a short talk on my graduation project but, more importantly, I finally saw what the creative coding community in India was up to.
It was an overload in many ways. Writing about it feels like the only way that I’ll be able to move past it, learn & grow from the experience.
Sangarshanan’s Programming-Constructs for Beat Making
Sangarshanan spoke on how we could create beats by using simple programming concepts in SonicPi. Technically, he uses an array with numbers to signify whether there is a sound (and what kind of sound) to be played when running through the array. For example:
#The array or 'construct'
grid1= [1,0,0,0, 2,0,0,0]
live_loop :note do
#tell the computer to iterate through the array 'x' times and declare that the number of current iteration is the value of 'index.
8.times do |index|
use_synth :pulse
#play note if index includes 1 & 2
play 62 if [1, 2].include? grid1[index]
#play note if index includes 2
play 32 if grid1[index] == 2
sleep 1
end
end
Interesting idea, but it’ll take me a while to understand the syntax and get used to SonicPi. You can check out Sangarshanan’s work here. After my talk, we spoke for a bit. He’s an extremely interesting and excited person and when I came home and googled him, I realised he’s spoken at so many developer conferences. And he somehow found my talk cool.
Anushka’s Workshop on Shaders using Punctual
Anushka introduced us to Punctual – a high-level language for live-coding visuals. I finally got introduced to the concept of shaders – the power of which fascinates me. I still have a lot to learn here, and I feel like a baby in this new world.
I wonder what the fusion of typography and shaders could look like – it’d open a whole new world of visual treatment for letters.
Not Understanding Where I Fit
It was a difficult day for me socially. I consistently felt like an outsider, not knowing where I fit. I couldn’t strike up a conversation and with the ones I tried, I didn’t get any reciprocation. Most of my conversations there came in the later half where people came up to me and spoke. Slight thanks to Mathura who understood that I wasn’t fitting well with the crowd.
It’s not just the fact that I am a little awkward socially, especially with intimidating people (they’re not intimidating, but their skill intimidates me), but also that I couldn’t figure out what the point of all this work was. It felt like this was an extended hobby, blown out of proportion by passionate folks.
I went out for a walk during the lunch break and really contemplated whether I should go back – I just didn’t know if ‘creative-coding’ had a place in the world. But I’m glad I went back.
Watching Abhinay Perform
I finally got the chance to see Abhinay live code some music in the algorave. Man, what an experience.
I stood at the back of the crowd, seeing him make almost perfect-sounding beats, live, with code. He was tweaking such small values leading to big audible changes. He’s also an incredible performer, and it’s energising to be lost in his zone of making music.
Varun was standing next to me and said – he’s gone so further into his art that whatever he makes now is so developed. It’s awesome. And there it was, in a room full of people smiling and swaying to music that a man programmed on his computer, that I knew where I wanted to be.
How & when will I get there? No freaking idea.
Everyone’s So Into Their Own Thing
I met most of the people that I look up to in the Indian creative-coding community. All of them had one thing in common – they were so invested with their own journeys. Mathura & Rasagy about the community, Karthik about his landscapes, Sangarshanan & Abhinay about their music, Varun about his art, Rohan about education and so on.
This was important to see, you know? I think it’s all about just keeping at it relentlessly until time gives way to you arriving at the cutting edge of something, finding your nichè and then exploring the depths of it.
[Experiments] Solving an office problem
This is a fun one.
Our office has a problem – self-locking doors. Every time that someone steps out and closes the door shut, the door locks itself and needs an access card for someone outside to enter again. If they forget their access card, someone in the office has to open the door for them. And it’s usually me – because I need the door shut for silence.
We’ve all collectively discussed this ‘problem’ atleast once in the last two years. No one did anything until one day I got very frustrated and solved this in <10 minutes.
The solution was very evident to me, considering that I had passively thought about it for a year. I had thought about high-tech ways, where the door could automatically unlock with a specific tap-pattern on the glass surface (from the outside). Or a rubber-band mechanism that would snap the door shut anytime the handle was let go of. So on and so-forth.
What it ultimately took was a piece of cardboard with a rotating flap that stops the lock from auto-locking. Any time that we want to lock the door, we just rotate the flap inwards (towards the office).
I stuck this up, observed a few people using it without them knowing about the mechanism and added a stick-note that reminded people about shutting the door when they leave for the day.
A week later, I can say that this works and exists as an invisible solution to a problem that a lot of us faced in the office. Design continues to amuse me, in a world of high-tech-boundary-pushing-innovations, sometimes all it takes is a piece of cardboard that is thoughtfully placed.
[Learnings + Thoughts] Active vs Passive Learning
I’d attended a learning lecture on ‘active learning’ with AND Academy. Just a couple of pointers that prompted me to think deeper:
Active learning – a passive task may be converted into an active learning experience (such as read a paper but then discuss, criticise and debate).
Are you getting students to create knowledge, rather than consume it?
It was interesting to see this. Maybe I think I’m facilitating active learning but I may not be doing so. I also think my style of teaching needs to involve more rapid experimentation – do / write / make something in tiny bursts of time that we use to demonstrate the explanation of a larger concept. I think I use more passive learning methods – sit back while I explain this to you, then you do it in a moderated environment with more time on your hands.
[Articles] Notorious ways in which AI is used
Interesting article by The New Yorker on how AI is being used for scams. Excerpt:
On a recent night, a woman named Robin was asleep next to her husband, Steve, in their Brooklyn home, when her phone buzzed on the bedside table. Robin is in her mid-thirties with long, dirty-blond hair. She works as an interior designer, specializing in luxury homes. The couple had gone out to a natural-wine bar in Cobble Hill that evening, and had come home a few hours earlier and gone to bed. Their two young children were asleep in bedrooms down the hall. “I’m always, like, kind of one ear awake,” Robin told me, recently. When her phone rang, she opened her eyes and looked at the caller I.D. It was her mother-in-law, Mona, who never called after midnight. “I’m, like, maybe it’s a butt-dial,” Robin said. “So I ignore it, and I try to roll over and go back to bed. But then I see it pop up again.”
She picked up the phone, and, on the other end, she heard Mona’s voice wailing and repeating the words “I can’t do it, I can’t do it.” “I thought she was trying to tell me that some horrible tragic thing had happened,” Robin told me. Mona and her husband, Bob, are in their seventies. She’s a retired party planner, and he’s a dentist. They spend the warm months in Bethesda, Maryland, and winters in Boca Raton, where they play pickleball and canasta. Robin’s first thought was that there had been an accident. Robin’s parents also winter in Florida, and she pictured the four of them in a car wreck. “Your brain does weird things in the middle of the night,” she said. Robin then heard what sounded like Bob’s voice on the phone. (The family members requested that their names be changed to protect their privacy.) “Mona, pass me the phone,” Bob’s voice said, then, “Get Steve. Get Steve.” Robin took this—that they didn’t want to tell her while she was alone—as another sign of their seriousness. She shook Steve awake. “I think it’s your mom,” she told him. “I think she’s telling me something terrible happened.”
Steve, who has close-cropped hair and an athletic build, works in law enforcement. When he opened his eyes, he found Robin in a state of panic. “She was screaming,” he recalled. “I thought her whole family was dead.” When he took the phone, he heard a relaxed male voice—possibly Southern—on the other end of the line. “You’re not gonna call the police,” the man said. “You’re not gonna tell anybody. I’ve got a gun to your mom’s head, and I’m gonna blow her brains out if you don’t do exactly what I say.”
[Programs] MARS College
Found this very cool program called Mars College, a three-month long educational program / R&D Lab in the desert.
I don't think getting there or speculating if CC has a place in this world are where your energies must be focused. It feels like you're reflecting but being extremely nihilistic about the entire thing. I remember one of our discussions at SGB you mentioned to another person in a discussion that you can't reverse engineer an outcome. It feels like you're forgetting your own point. Purpose and meaning are derived and crafted during a journey, you're too early to pin down on anything. Why pin down at all? Life's more fun that way.