25/10/2025 –, Iniciante
This is about the synergies between my art practice and my role as the maintainer of the Python library py5, and how these two seemingly disparate activities shape each other’s evolution and growth.
How can maintaining an open source project contribute to an artist’s art practice? How can an artist’s art practice productively guide the design and development of an open source project?
This talk will be about the synergies between maintaining the creative coding library py5 and my career as an artist. Both originated at the same time, and since the beginning, they have contributed to and guided each other’s evolution and growth. They are intimately connected and forever intertwined.
I’ll discuss these connections with specific coding examples and show how I designed py5 to enable me to do everything from exploring and prototyping ideas to creating large scale digital animations. I’ll also talk about what I see for the future of py5, where I want to go as an artist, and how both of these will continue to support each other and result in more creative coding contributions to share with the open source community.
- Basic understanding of Python programming and interest in computer graphics
- Basic familiarity with what it means to maintain an open source library
- Curiosity about new media art and creative coding
Participants will see open source library maintenance not as an unpaid software development job, but instead as an enriching activity that inspires creative ideas and knowledge that simply cannot be obtained any other way. Attendees will also get ideas about how authoring an open source library could contribute to their own individual aspirations and goals.
Escolha uma ou mais áreas em que essa proposta se encaixa –Career, Creative Programming
James Schmitz is a visual artist and creative technologist based in the United States. He is the author and maintainer of the open source library py5.