ART && CODE: DIY 3D Sensing and Visualization

is a festival and conference concerned with the artistic, technical, tactical and cultural potentials of low-cost 3D scanning devices — especially, but not exclusively, including the revolutionary Microsoft Kinect sensor.

New Culture from a New Community
It’s been less than a year since Microsoft released the Kinect depth sensor. In that time, the device has revolutionized the field of computer vision and prompted a vibrant and global new community of makers to create thousands of innovative new interactive experiences. Whether working in classrooms, university research laboratories, personal garages, or independent artists’ studios, these individuals have explored the possibilities of using the Kinect to control real-time robotics, assist the disabled, perform music, interact with virtual environments, or simply have fun in new and unexpected ways.

An Event Series for Arts Engineering
The ART && CODE initiative is organized by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry — a laboratory for atypical and interdisciplinary research at the intersection of arts, science, culture and technology. Under a broad educational mandate to promote computational thinking, the STUDIO seeks to transform culture through critically-aware freestyle computing and curiosity-driven engineering. Our ART && CODE events follow a magic formula that combines hands-on workshops in a wide variety of arts-engineering platforms, with demonstrations and lecture presentations by leading international practitioners.

About ART && CODE: DIY 3D Sensing and Visualization
ART && CODE 3D is the third in our series of events featuring software programming tools for artists, designers, students and makers. It’s a Kinect-centered “maker’s festival” which brings together, for the first time, these tinkering-oriented artists and hackers with equally enthusiastic academic researchers (from fields such as HCI and machine vision) and industrial game developers.

Previous ART && CODE Symposia
We have organized two prior ART && CODE conferences to date. Our first event, “ART && CODE: Programming Environments for Artists, Young People, and the Rest of Us” was held in March 2009, and featured 26 workshops in eleven different arts-programming languages, as well as lecture presentations by fifteen of the key innovators leading significant revolutions in software-arts education. Our second event, “MOBILE ART && CODE: Mobile Media and Interactive Arts” in November 2009, delved into the aesthetic and tactical potentials of mobile, networked and locative media. Both events included free lecture presentations that contextualized the use of programming technologies in a variety of contemporary critical, artistic and design practices.