Art, Code and a Bowl of Fruit @ Control Shift Festival

This workshop has been an ongoing development with Pete Bennett and Dave Webb. It originated from chats in the pub with the Control Shift crowd, coming up with accessible workshops to engage people in using code to make art - particularly those who have never coded before.

In the Art, code and a bowl of fruit sessions we go through the basics of creating your own version of Microsoft Paint using a programming language called Processing. Having designed your set of paintbrushes we then take the code for a test spin with a life drawing session. Our first run of the workshop was at the Pervasive Media Studio.

During 2020 we converted the workshop to an online version on zoom as part of the Control Shift Festival. For this workshop we had a big messy google doc that everyone could access so that people could share their artworks and their code with each other. It turned out to be a great way for everyone to share "paintbrushes" and ideas with one other and get to see each others creations. We set up a range of still lifes and human poses via the camera and held them for set durations like in a traditional life drawing session.

You can have a play yourself using our example code on GitHub and find out more about the 2020 Control Shift Festival here.