It’s taken me a little while, but here’s a brief recap of what was quite possibly the most heart-warming and thrilling conference I will ever have the chance to attend — ART + CODE: a symposium on programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us.

First, a hearty thank you to Golan Levin who did a tremendous job planning and organizing the mind-bending experience. Some highlights:

Oxford Project Part III — Thanks to the ever ebullient Ira Greenberg and Miami University for sponsoring (and the Studio for Creative Inquiry @ CMU for giving us space), we were able to convene before the main festivities began to give Processing a push towards some number past 1.0. Stay tuned for exciting improvements in Processing’s video and OPENGL libraries as well as to the IDE itself.

Saturday was a day full of workshops. In the morning, I attempted to teach an entire semester of ICM in under three hours, followed by an afternoon mix of topics related to physics simulation and image processing.

Sunday was the day to end all days with the lineup of speakings including lead developers of the languages / environments: Alice, Pure Data, Scratch, Hackety Hack, Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, vvvv, ExtendScript, and openFrameworks. Some highlights within highlights here were Luke Dubois’ demo of “what is known in the biz as random atonal crap” and Sebastian Oschatz’s boy band metaphor for multi-screen setups (one that I really need to take a look at more closely as we develop “most pixels ever” at ITP.) Videos of all the Sunday talks will eventually be posted at vimeo/artandcode.

On Monday, I was lucky to have the chance before heading home to catch the work of Casey Reas and Marius Watz at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Of course, all of this was really just an excuse for a nice group photo.