Things I learned from the GenArtHackParty

Posted on February 21st, 2013 by Sacha Chua

I spent Friday evening and all of Saturday at the Generative Art Hack Party that Xavier Snelgrove organized. It was a good excuse to learn paper.js and d3js.

Here’s what I made:

Bouncing spline: Reminds me of that old screensaver, with a little bit of randomness thrown in.
Flowers: Playing around with opacity
Faces: Simple shapes for awesomeness
Kapow: I read too many comic books.
Pasketti: Because drawing curves like this made me think about spaghetti, but not quite.

I thought Partycles was cool. infinitedaisyworld was nicely done, too. =) Check out the rest of the submissions.

In addition to learning more about HTML5 canvas drawing with Javascript, I learned that:

If I start thinking of things as “art”, I can get stuck waiting for an interesting idea, especially if I’m in that mid-afternoon slump. If I don’t worry about coming up with a vision first and instead read the documentation or play around with functions, I can let curiosity take me to interesting places.

A room full of 20-30 geeks coding away isn’t distracting, although I still haven’t figured out how to interrupt people and ask about stuff.

Add another ~20 people and switch into party mode, and I begin to shut down socially. I don’t particularly feel like engaging in conversation, and I don’t feel like I’m completely there in conversations. It might be a decibel thing, it might be a listening thing. I wish I’d thought of sneaking downstairs for quieter conversations instead.

Xavier Snelgrove, Jen Dodd, and TinEye know how to have a great event with awesome healthy food.

After lots of social interaction, I tend to get wiped out. I slept for twelve hours the following day.

An evening and a full Saturday feels like it was enough to disrupt our home routines, which is not good news in terms of my participation in hackathons. I think I need to be more social in order to make the most of hackathons, anyway.

So, how do I want to follow up on this?

I’d like to add that d3js calendar visualization to QuantifiedAwesome.com. I think it would be interesting to see heatmaps of activities.

HackLab will probably be a good way to practise being around other people when I’m coding, and the open houses on Tuesday would be good desensitization for mingling.

I’d love to learn more about Quantified Self and visualization.

Sometimes, if I start thinking of things as “possibilities,” I get stuck waiting for an interesting idea. What if I set aside one morning each week to do this kind of planning / brainstorming / looking ahead, knowing that the rest of the week can be focused on actually trying things out and making things happen, even if they’re not Super Brilliant things? If I brainstorm a list of things I can explore, then I can keep moving forward even if the creative part of my brain wants to procrastinate. I trust that if I keep exploring, curiosity will lead me to interesting places.

Good experience. Would do it again, especially if I can figure out how to hack the social parts.

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Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/24489

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