First ART && CODE Conference Organized by Golan Levin

Organized by Golan Levin to promote software-arts education, the conference took place from March 7-9, 2009, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, focusing on “programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us.” It attracted 234 attendees from 7 countries and 23 U.S. states, ranging in age from 11 to 75. Participants included middle-school teachers, computer science professors, European C++ hackers and students from various educational backgrounds. It featured 26 workshops across 11 different arts-programming languages and lectures by fifteen innovators revolutionizing software-arts education. This gathering highlighted the expansive interest and diverse applications of coding in creative and educational contexts.

Levin spoke to me about the importance of the conference:

“I also helped organize conferences like Art && Code, where I was bringing people together to have conversations about what it means to make open-source software tools for the arts. In 2009 I ran the very first Art && Code and it’s ongoing to this day. The conference brought together the people who were creating programming environments for artists. Zach was there, Casey was there and Ben was there. Luke DuBois was there from Max/MSP/Jitter. Dan Shiffman was there. It was an interesting group of folks working on all sorts of different tools. This was one of the first times I was able to organize something that leveraged my resources and ability to bring people together to have conversations to advance the state of the art in open-source software toolkits for the arts.”