Looking back at 2022

How do you begin an annual review of the year 2022? Normally, I don’t comment on current events because it’s important to me to design my content to last as long as possible and stay focused on the topic of creative coding. But with this post, it would seem absurd for me not to put the brutal attack on Ukraine first, because it just moves me a lot, more than the great things I’ve been able to experience this year. A brutal war in Europe by a dictatorship gone mad with perfidious, cross-border propaganda, that is really an indescribable disaster.

Nevertheless, I look back on this year with the utmost gratitude. At the turn of the year, I was preparing my master’s thesis, which I finally finished in the early summer. This was followed by a wonderful trip from Lake Geneva through the French Alps to the Mediterranean coast of southern France. I cycled the distance with 3 friends, crossed an alpine pass and lived 2 weeks pretty much without internet. No news, no Instagram. We spent a large part of the tour camping and in nature. That was a real blessing.

Shortly after that, we entered the hot phase of planning the DEMO festival, which I was invited to curate this year. The festival itself was a surreal experience, where I met dozens of people I only knew from the internet. The whole planning, the team, the great meetings with people I appreciate infinitely. My god that was great!

From late summer on, I have been fully focused on developing my courses. Through freelance projects for clients like IBM and Slate and Ash, as well as the increased income through my Patreon, I was finally able to outsource some tasks to others to focus on the really important things.

Below you see the music video for Slate and Ash I did together with Lena Weber. For their newest product, a software synthesizer called “Choreographs”, which went on the market at the end of this year, we developed a visual world, that aims to represent the characteristics of the instrument.

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One of the most important steps for my website and my curriculum this year was to port all lessons from Processing to p5.js and thus make them accessible also for those who preferably work with Javascript. I had some awesome helpers in the process, and I’d like to personally thank them here. Special thanks go to Fred, Lena and Albert. In the future I would like to involve the community even more in the development and corrections of the courses. I really need direct fedback on the nearly 400 lessons on the website. Since I’m primarily involved in developing new content, this unfortunately often takes a backseat.

AI just landed on planet earth

The final spurt of the year has seen huge leaps in the field of artificial intelligence: With Dalle2, Midjourney or StableDiffusion, there are now powerful ai-based technologies for generating image motifs that are already having a huge impact in the world of art and design. Then, just a week after publishing this post, came ChatGPT, another tool from OpenAI for generating text. Not only can it be used to generate high quality writings, but it can even be used to write code. Free of charge and accessible to everyone.

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

Edward O Wilson (2009)

In my opinion, technologies like Dalle2 or ChatGPT are fascinating, disruptive and dangerous. They will most likely lead to much more bullshit on the Internet, and to an even greater degree, superfluous and false information raining down on us. This is worrying, but it also reinforces my stance and goal as a creative coding educator to make the world of technology a little bit more accessible and understandable to creative people, hopefully to give them a more reflected view of it.

Wrapping up

2023 was moving, full of events, encounters, of boundaries and pushing the limits. I’m now really looking forward to mid-January, which I’ll spend in Spain with Martin Lorenz. After that I will stay in Barcelona for a few weeks. I need a breath of fresh air.

If you are also in Barcelona I would be happy to meet you! Feel free to write me a mail or via Discord.

So far, warm greetings, a nice christmas time!

Oh, and feel free to comment this post. 😉

Tim

🎄