The Art of Coding: The Language of Drawing, Graphics, and Animation

As the title suggests, this book explores the concepts of drawing, graphics and animation in the context of coding. In this endeavour, in addition to initiating the process with some historical perspectives on programming languages, it prides itself by presenting complex concepts in an easy-to-understand fashion for students, artists, hobbyists as well as those interested in computer science, computer graphics, digital media, or interdisciplinary studies.

Being able to code requires abstract thinking, mathematics skills, spatial ability, logical thinking, imagination, and creativity. All these abilities can be acquired with practice, and can be mastered by practical exposure to art, music, and literature. This book discusses art, poetry and other forms of writing while pondering difficult concepts in programming; it looks at how we use our senses in the process of learning computing and programming.

Features:

• Introduces coding in a visual way
• Explores the elegance behind coding and the outcome
• Includes types of outcomes and options for coding
• Covers the transition from front-of-classroom instruction to the use of online-streamed video tutorials
• Encourages abstract and cognitive thinking, as well as creativity

The Art of Coding contains a collection of learning projects for students, instructors and teachers to select specific themes from. Problems and projects are aimed at making the learning process entertaining, while also involving social exchange and sharing. This process allows for programming to become interdisciplinary, enabling projects to be co-developed by specialists from different backgrounds, enriching the value of coding and what it can achieve.

The authors of this book hail from three different continents, and have several decades of combined experience in academia, education, science and visual arts.

Source Code: The source code for the book can be accessed here.

Mohammad Majid al-Rifaie is a lecturer and researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. His background is in computing and journalism and his artistic interests focuses on the interconnections between artificial intelligence, swarm intelligence, robotics and digital art. He has several publications in the field of swarm intelligence and biologically inspired algorithms, analysing their performance and providing possible integration strategies. Many of Mohammad’s projects on the aforementioned fields have been well received and sponsored by external entities (i.e. Luz by VIDA Fundación Telefónica competition of art and artificial intelligence 13th edition, Swarms Go Dutch by the American University of Paris and Mr Confused Robotic Household by Goldsmiths Annual Fund, University of London). He has organised several events, including computational art exhibitions, chaired various symposiums and severed as a guest-editor in a recent special issue journal for Taylor & Francis’s Connection Science.

Anna Ursyn, PhD, is a professor and Computer Graphics, Area Head at the School of Art and Design, University of Northern Colorado, USA. She co-wrote two book chapters on coding for visuals. She combines programming with software and printmaking media, to unify computer generated and painted images, and mixed-media sculptures. Ursyn had over 30 single juried and invitational art shows, participated in over 100 juried and invitational fine art exhibitions, such as: over a dozen times in ACM SIGGRAPH Art Galleries and traveling shows.

Theodor Wyeld is currently a Lecturer in Digital Media at Flinders University, Australia. He is on a number of review committees and has published widely. Attracting more than 2 million in grants and venture capital, he is the inventor of ’thereitis.com’. The patented ’thereitis’ technology is the culmination of 10 years of research in usability studies on how to better support the sorting of large collections of images. Between 2004 and 2009 he was a research associate with the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design. He has an extensive background in architecture, planning and digital media production. He is completing a PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.