Thread by @toxi

1/ Painful realisation: The more I've learned, done & created over the years, the less I know how to even talk about it & get somewhat frustrated not being able to produce an elevator pitch for my last 10-15 years of near daily activity
trying to create...

2/ ...an alternative ecosystem of tools & concepts for creative coding. So here's a 🧵 to summarize my #PCD2021 talk a bit more: I likely missed _most_ of the key points I wanted to make on Thur, esp. the parts I didn't even get to present due to running out of time...

3/ ...with too much (time) spent on oldskool roots & anecdotes, which albeit important for larger context and maybe interesting to some, are not _that_ important in larger picture... I'm sorry!

4/ Partially to blame for that is an intense pre-occupation w/ attempting to move my fam out of the truly alienating env the UK has become, back to mainland Europe, with only a very narrow window of opportunity (i.e. next 2 months) available & w/o clarity from my US employer...

5/ if working remotely in the future remains an option... Anyone looking for an experienced computational designer/SWE in DE/CH, preferably Alpen region? :)

Disclaimer: I want to point out that it's honestly far from my intention to single out Processing, its crew & community...

6/ However, the event on Thursday _was_ about P5. Also, being the by far most widely used tool/environment (once a challenger of the status quo, now being the very same!), this community & its stewards _could_ have the biggest impact to move things forward and...

7/ I do hope this is read & understood with the best & warmest of intentions. Hand on heart, I do mean no harm!!

8/ Since getting involved w/ P5 core (2003-2006), building toxiclibs (~2006-2012), and esp. since starting thi.ng in 2011, I felt the fledgling creative coding community
has always been missing something, ...

9/ ...with most big contenders focusing on the same niches, imperative DoThisThenThat! approaches & shallow learning curves to produce quick-win results in no time, rather than actively questioning & challenging the nature of code, the languages (incl. their own!), the history &

10/ ...patterns/approaches used for _creative_ coding itself! It's been 20 years. There's nothing inherently creative about imperative coding. After years of working w/ other langs, IMHO it's the least elegant approach. Granted, it produces results and satisfies an ever growing

11/ ...number of users/people and institutions to putting up energy, time & money for this, but just for a second, imagine where our field _could_ be, if our combined exploration of the opportunity space would not involve 95%+ of people all following (and being consumers of)...

12/ ...the very same search beam (i.e. our popular frameworks) to expose hitherto unknown sights & lands. Lands, which can only be effectively discovered & explored by changing the _structure_ (or nature) of the search, i.e. _how_ we talk to machines. How to layer/xform concepts?

13/ Form follows Function and vice versa! This has never been more true than in creative coding! Of course, in theory any Turing-complete language is interchangeable, yet this doesn't say anything about the roads & lessons taken (or even _not_ taken) to get there.

14/ To be clear, I'm _not_ talking about ML as an alternative here (it's just another one of these search lights, albeit one using a very different lens). I'd like to see less incremental change & more variety in terms of data-driven creative coding (via the fully felt embrace &

15/ deep appreciation of qualities & philosophies of the maaany langs available today), have more comparisons to learn strengths/weaknesses, then celebrate & actively promote that variety in creative computing. Instead we still have platform-based community silos as in the 1980s

16/ Less labelling and dismissing of people who deeply care about & question the nature of code as "code snobs". More cross-fertilization of ideas rather than fostering and community/empire building as institutionalized (open source or otherwise) mono-cultures & hype cycles.

17/ In short, _this_ is what I've been quietly trying to do with thi.ng for the past 10 years: Building a loose "ecosystem", environment, architecture, anti-framework of micro-tools which are polyglot, "full stack" (🤮), largely independent, functional...

18/ encourage endless (re)composition as an approach to problem solving, embrace data/structures/flow as 1st class citizens (not as afterthoughts) for creative problem solving, and provide tools which foster creation & exploration of new DSLs/APIs, techniques, code gen etc.

19/ The imperative/procedural approach is merely one way of looking at the world & talking to machines. For a long time I've doubted that this should be the most natural/suitable way artists/designers think and execute ideas (not everyone is a Sol LeWitt)

20/ (I've gotten into hot water about this comment many times before). The imperative approach is just very much anchored in mechanization, automation and military-style philosophies, most of which are not just diametrically opposed to many artistic endeavors/cultures,

21/ ...but over the years I've come to learn that these underlying philosophies are also quite alien to many kinds of computational/generative design, which often call for and/or inherently desire/prefer an either more mathematical, functional and/or

22/ ...generally (data) flow oriented, bottom-up approach to computing. "Be water my friend, be water!" In the end, _all_ creative coding outputs are the result of transformations of _data_, yet how many of our primary tools/frameworks are actually focused on this aspect

23/ ...or actively innovating on this front? How many? Neal Stephenson's "The Feed" vs "The Seed", aka Top-Down vs Bottom-Up aka Centralized vs De-centralized dualities come to mind. Tools vs. Meta-tools. Producing results vs. learning to build your own tools to produce results.

24/ I'm very well aware these views are an utter & total minority and I'm very much contend with that. I'm not here to convince you and have always believed a piece of work should speak for itself rather than attempting to convince people or sell it to them.

25/ Some will understand & appreciate the work, others don't (or don't want to). C'est la vie...

26/ For time reasons (see above) I simply cannot go into more detail at this point (though I'd like to!), but promise to follow up with a longer (and long overdue) blog post in the future, illustrating more of these concepts and differences with the help of concrete examples...

27/ So long & thanks for reading and thanks for all the fish!

Message ends.