 Hi everyone and welcome to Knight Foundation Discovery, our weekly look at the arts and its impact on our communities. I'm Chris Barr, Director of Art and Technology Innovation at Knight Foundation. And today we're gonna be talking about open source tools for creative expression and art making. And our guests today are Shanae Holloway, she's an artist and director or professor, rather at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And Chris Coleman, who is director of Clinic for Open Source Arts and a professor at Denver University. Welcome to you both. Thank you very much, good to be here. How are you all? So we have a lot to unpack, right? So the title for this is open source tools for creative expression. So we've got a lot in there, we've got open source, we've got tools and tool making and we've got ideas about art and creative expression and folks who make art using digital tools. And I wonder if we could start at the top and just talk a little bit about this face of digital creation and where these tools sit within it. So, I think we've been thinking a long time about what it means to have control over the sort of set of brushes or tools that you use to make your artwork and how much your very work and the things that you can create, that content itself, how much that's shaped by the tools. And so like using a tool like Adobe Photoshop means that while it's nearly limitless in its possibilities, it also does have limits and those do shape what it is you can create and what it is you're putting out into the world. And so there's something about this sort of other ecosystem of open source tools that allow you to see both sides of how it's made and how it can be used. And that opens up the possibility to make your own and really start to make the custom brush that's really gonna serve what it is that you want to express. And that's really sort of the core notion that I think digital technology enables, but other kinds of art technology enable that as well. Art is just a little bit more complicated in some ways. Right. Yes. Oh, go ahead, Shani. I was just gonna say, yeah, it's so true. And I think one of the reasons why open source software and other kinds of bits and pieces that are made fits so well in the artistic community of people who wanna be creative is because also you get the chance to have sort of a feedback loop with the folks that might create that software or that hardware, whatever it is that you're using whereas you don't with Adobe, there's this thing about like if you design for everyone, you design for no one. And these kinds of big, bigger corporations are necessarily designing for kind of everybody, but with these open source tools it can be really niche because a lot of them I think really come out of this need for one thing to happen, right? And they get to listen even a little bit closer because maybe their motivations aren't money and artists I think really especially gravitate towards this because we do need really specialized things or creative people. We need specialized things to get the job done but also we wanna be able to have a say because I don't know when the last time it was you talked to an artist but we don't really do anything that we're supposed to do or what we're told to do and especially if we're given something we definitely don't want it, so. Right, you want tools that are easily broken and exploited in new ways. Or we want them to stay the same. I mean, that's another thing too, the maintenance of these tools. Adobe Photoshop is a really great one where there's a whole movement of glitch artists that we're making and breaking things within Adobe Photoshop that now a lot of the versions of a lot of the safety protocols can't, we can't do that anymore. So there's lots of opportunities. So we have artists who are working with technology and really interdisciplinary models for making things and even what to call this field that ranges from creative coding to new media art to things that are hard to define is tricky. And we know that there's a set of tools that are often supporting that and I think that's a piece of what we wanna talk about today. For those who aren't aware, when we say open source, open source on one hand is a licensing regime, right? It's a set of permissions that we put on a piece of software. On another hand, it's a structure by which you might think about community and you might think about how things get made. So could we talk a little bit about why open source and why those models are so attractive for people who are creating art specifically? Yeah, I mean, I think Shanae really got to one of the most critical parts is that, you know, many times there's a tool that maybe only 50 people in the world want to use. And so like, how does that get made? Like, you know, no companies are gonna make that tool. They're never gonna make their money back developing that tool. But like one or two or 10 or 15 people can sort of pull their efforts together and create and then most importantly, maintain a tool like that by combining their efforts and also understanding that, you know, open source isn't a sort of fixed set of people, that it's a sort of flow of people coming in, finding a tool, using the tool, helping make some changes and then flowing out to maybe another tool and that sort of fluidity and understanding that people are coming in and out of a project and moving through it. That's like why open source is so essential but like, you know, I wanna do a specific project like let's say I didn't make this beautiful or work behind me but let's say I wanna make something like this and I want a tool that really makes these beautiful patterns and I wanna add a new feature to it and I think other people will like it. Well, I can see that code, I can offer that feature to the rest of the community and you know, maybe they'll accept it, maybe it'll be part of the tool going into the future and then maybe I move on to something completely different but that there's other people who come and continue to sort of carry the load of keeping that thing functional and useful or not like it's okay to let them go too, which again is another sort of beautiful part of this ecosystem. So you are both artists and this is sort of pretty abstract right now and I'm curious, Shaunee, could you talk a little bit about how these tools find their way into the work that you create? Yeah, I mean, I think a little bit to follow up on what Chris just said too, there's a number of aspects of dreaming with the open source community ethics, hopefully in my opinion, if we're doing it right, there is and this dreaming is a necessary sort of collective dreaming that can happen and I think with artists comes mentorship and for me at least these tools have come into my hands through mentors or through people that I've trusted or people who are trying to help me out or say like, oh, you just graduated from college and you can't afford your Maya anymore or whatever, like here, use Blender or try WIC editor, it's really cool, like you can just get started really fast, prototype that thing, right? That dreaming extends also to, you know, oh, you feel like this interface is really like oppressive. Here, maybe try this tool. It was made by someone who might be more like-minded to you. I love this idea that open source arts is about collective dreaming, right? That together we're gonna think about the world we wanna create and we're gonna make the tools to realize that and we're gonna do it together. You know, I think so often, you know, we think about both in especially the visual art world and in the software world, this idea of the solo genius and I think a lot of what you are talking about is community, it's about togetherness and how do you manage projects and realize a future together and in a lot of ways, this becomes really important and so your work with the Clinic for Open Source Arts is really about how do you nurture those communities and how do you help these projects along? Chris, could you just talk a little bit about what that effort is and the work that you're trying to do there? Yeah, you know, the Clinic for Open Source Arts came out of me being a professor who teaches with a lot of open source tools. So I, as Seanne says, like I feel it's really important to put my students as young artists into the world with things that they're gonna be able to afford to continue to use just at a base level. Like you've just gotten done paying for college. Like it can you afford to pay for the tools that you're gonna continue to work with is a really big question. But so I think that initiated me on this path of like how do I support these ecosystems because some of them are like amazing and some of them I'm really worried about, right? You know, we talked about sustainability quite a bit and so the question became like how do I use my institution, my sort of base of knowledge to think about that and how do I, you know, connect with other people notably Golan Levin at Carnegie Mellon University, the studio for creative inquiry. Like he's been doing this for years trying to help different open source projects be realized and sustained. So I really thought about the clinic for open source arts as a clinic in that we're thinking about the health of these tools that we rely on every day. And so like, what does it mean for a tool or a project or a community to be healthy? You know, it means that it needs to have a diverse group of people working and thinking about what it is. It needs to be welcoming to all different kinds of contributions. It needs to be sustainable. It needs to not have people burn out and, you know, burn the project down in flames because they can't deal with the stress anymore. And it needs to help projects that whose time has passed and it's time for them to sort of sunset. And even what does that even look like? So many of these topics have been talked about maybe in some regard for bigger open source projects more generally in computer science. But I feel like by focusing on tools for creativity we've got a very different kind of community. And it enables us to have, frankly, some much more progressive conversations about what it might look like for open source, especially for artists. But I hope actually these lessons can cascade out to other projects as well. Tools that may be not targeted at artists, but artists also leverage and are certainly also leveraged, you know, at museums and other spaces. Yeah, so absolutely as we think about art and technology and how it's supported through those institutional structures. On one hand, you all are both in universities and you're teaching courses, you're training a next generation of artists who are using specific tools and maybe learning about how to create and be a contributor in those communities. The artwork that gets created, and I think one of the things that's interesting, especially code based art is often, it's not just that the tool is created to make the thing, but that the code is often running the project as well. So there becomes a conservation issue long-term if we wanna think about how some of these things run in the future. And so there's a lot there as we're thinking about what becomes critical about these individual tools. But I like the teaching element because I think one of the things both of you are working on is the teaching element. And that's not just in the classroom, but it's also within the community. And so I'm curious if you can speak to how do we teach these tools to people who are curious, people who want to start making things with P5JS, with processing with other tools that are available. And how we think about this idea of turning someone from someone who's interested to becoming a contributor. And what are the various ways you think folks can contribute to that? I mean, I think one really easy answer to this is just do it, like, you know. Just go, just get up there and take her. You can't break it. For real. It's really bothers me sometimes, especially in the academy where people are like, oh, we can't teach open source. They have to know this for their jobs. And I'm like, it's first of all, we have a standard of how to use a computer, how to use an interface, right? It, you know, something as basic as if you can't find it, go look in the documentation, Google it, or look at the, you know, in the menu, it's a base, you know, there are familiar objects within these open source tools. I think a lot of people feel like open source is so far away from anything that they could possibly ever relate to, right? But in reality, a lot of these things are just copies of what you can pay for, but just a little bit more customizable. And with education, you know, there's a canon. And I think right now we're in a moment where we're starting to say like, as professors, am I brave enough to like go against this canon? And personally, you know, no one checks on me. I see in my classrooms, I know whatever I want. And so, you know, we have these opportunities as people in authoritative positions to start putting these foots, foots feet forward. And, you know, I always say it only takes one person to care about a student or to say like, hey, you know, have you ever thought about this? It only takes one minute with one person. And I think, yeah, that's just, that's how you start with open source. But you yourself also in the classroom where as an older, as a parent, even have to be open to understanding a new language. And I think that, you know, radical pedagogy, which is what I hope folks are leading with in the classroom really starts with this openness and modeling that for even children, you know, university, you know, we're all gone by university. You know, we're in our step. But, you know, modeling that for children young is also important to the way that the future of our even internet and computers will go. You know, we need to think about the next generation and the more that we use open source the more that they're going to be able to change the landscape of how we navigate. Okay. I always love the notion of like, oh, it's industry standard. And so like we have to train them for it. But the funny part is, is it's industry standard because the last group of students that were taught were taught with these tools. And so like by choosing to teach those tools again you're actually perpetuating that standard. And so like, if you want to see change it actually has to begin here at the educational level because that's how people walk into a movie studio and say, actually I can do all this with Blender and you can not pay the $10,000 Maya license. And all of a sudden that studio is going to be reconsidering what they're doing. So I love that notion of change. And I'll just double on the other part of your question, Chris which is like, we actually live in an amazing age of like YouTube and Twitch and like you can literally learn anything now. And you know, I'm thinking about Erin Davies. She's got cozy coding over on Twitch where she just sort of like talks about and codes with people while chilling on her bed amongst her stuffed animals. And you know, learning to code that way is a really sort of beautiful way of thinking about getting into it and being comfortable with dabbling and playing. And then it becomes more and more serious as you have ideas of what you want to execute. So as you think of the tools available to artist creators, folks that want to tinker right now what's the sort of starter kit for folks who are watching that that want to know what toolkits are available to them that they can go and download and play with today. We've heard you mentioned Blender. We've, I mentioned P5JS and processing which is a specialized library for artists specifically. But are there other tools big or small that you think are really neat that people might need to know about? Definitely. Twine is something that that's like the first thing that I always teach in my classroom because it sets a foundation for understanding HTML and CSS. And then we move forward from there. And for me that was actually even still is probably one of the only fluid languages or those two are the only fluid languages I know along with JavaScript. But once you know HTML and CSS you can kind of move also onto P5JS, learn that structure and then move forward from there and kind of scaffold a solid programming sort of knowledge. And of course we have been thinking about this question quite a bit over at COSA and actually produced a series of videos just last month called the COSA Connectors where we asked open source curators or journalists, I don't know, they're somewhere in between to do a little two minute movies introducing a lot of these fantastic tools. You should definitely check that out if you wanna just hear about some of the cool options because in fact there are so many and as a digital professor I'm always like, well, tell me more about what you wanna do and then I can tell you some tools that might help you do that just because there are thousands, like there's one that's for making zines, there's ones that are for drawing pixelated cats. It really goes a pretty long way. And I think it also depends on whether you want to do something like creative coding which is really for generative art or creating quick animations or maybe even doing interactive things and interactive interfaces where as you might also wanna use something like Inkscape that's going to allow for, that's more like Photoshop and you're just doing photo manipulation. So the span really is there. So for folks watching, I'm gonna say stick around because we'll see a clip of one of these COSA connectors videos with Shawnee talking about the project that she mentioned, Twine and there are more online on YouTube. I wanna get to thinking about open source and this idea of free and what is sort of being spent in the creation of these projects, right? You know, open source is a paradigm that's about a license that allows you to alter source code. And people often put those tools out on the internet for you to download and use for free on the monetary side. But in order to create them, folks are volunteering their time often. And so the ability for everyone to volunteer their time gets into sort of questions about power and resources and ability to participate in that kind of activity. And I wonder if you all could talk a little bit about different ways to think about how people contribute to these projects and ways that we should be ensuring that we're valuing people's time. I think, you know, I accidentally started becoming a contributor in some way. And I had to, I started with administrative contributions and I really felt like, oh man, maybe I'm not doing the real, maybe I'm not a real contributor because I'm not doing the poll requests and the issues and fixing stuff in the code and whatever. And I really had to unlearn that. And the P5JS project with everyone who really makes that project, the project really taught me that, you know, the aspects that you can kind of move forward into the contributor dump or whatever are all important because, you know, project can't just run on code folks. People really find their nation, whether that's any support role, period, or even just like being that person who's there at all the events, right? I think boundaries and also knowing your strengths are things that can come with time if you've never worked within a community structure before, but that none of these contributions are disvalued. Hopefully, I mean, I don't know that that's true everywhere, but hopefully, and then if it doesn't work in one project, that there is another project out there and that, you know, the many variety of projects will also necessarily come with different kinds of ways to be a contributor. Yeah, that's super important. I think Lauren McCarthy with P5JS really defines that project in a way of thinking about contributions. It, you know, like beyond the code and so long we've dealt with this notion of open source as a gift from some smart guy, typically, and he's sort of like granted upon the world and other people are probably helping, but he's the genius who's made this thing and everybody should just like, you know, wait for him to grant you with new gifts and every other kind of contribution is sort of like a bonus and so turning that around and saying like actually the people who are making the code are, you know, important and they're doing important work, but so are the people that are writing documentation, so are the people who are making tutorials, so are the people who are teaching other people about this tool, so are the people who are giving money to the tool and so are the people who are just like advocating or interested, you know, this makes up an entire ecosystem of contribution to what makes a tool viable and healthy and sustainable and so changing that notion has been really so important and the primary work of Joseph, frankly, because these projects can't exist and we've seen it time and time again, these projects cannot exist with just like the sole genius who's, you know, carrying the whole cross up the mountain and won't let anybody help and then they burn out and then the project just falls flat because they've never trained anybody else or prepared anybody else to be part of the leadership of the project and so thinking about how to diffuse these and make them more of a community effort assures that they actually talked a lot about something called the bus factor, like if one person was hit by a bus would this tool disappear and like how many people would be hit by a bus before the project would be disappear is the health of the project, yeah. So for folks, we've got a question here from the audience and curious if you can talk a little bit about how your work and how others who are working with these tools, creating artwork with these tools, what are the media sources, sources of information that are covering this space for folks who wanna learn about it? Where do they go to start digging in and finding out about projects? Are there go-to spots? I mean, yeah, I feel like open source is funny because you can be reading something in the cut or just like any media source and maybe they're talking about these things and don't know that they're open source because of that thing that I was talking about of like, there are, oh, maybe I should've identified but there are large corporations that use these open source tools and you may just literally never know what's going on but also it's kind of where this is just like you can't be afraid to talk to human beings that are there. I mean, I think most open source folks have GitHub or some kind of repository where their code lives and there's necessarily folks moderating that and there are forums and things like this and they can definitely be incredibly daunting especially depending on what project you're actually interested in knowing more about because of racism, misogyny and all the stuff that we would love to get rid of in the world but I think every community has that kind of entry tax in some way but to learn about it for real I think getting your hands kind of dirty in that community is the best way or at least that's what I would say to my students. Thinking about one of those entry taxes it seems that coding itself can be one of those gateways to entry for digital art making. What recommendations do you have for folks who don't code who want to make digital art and want to fool around with digital tools where might they start to create things? I mean, one of the obvious ones is one of the friendliest points of entry really is P5JS the project we've been talking about I believe that's at P5JS.org, is that correct? And they've put a lot of energy into having learning resources there on the webpage. If you want to see somebody super energetic and excited about teaching coding and who does it really well Daniel Schiffman has a series online called The Coding Train and so if you look up Coding Train on YouTube you can find his tutorials about using P5JS. His energy is super infectious and you can't help but have fun with him. And I think, I mean, everybody I talked to is like, oh you learned to code from Daniel Schiffman too? And I'm like, yeah. We all learned to code from Daniel Schiffman. And you know, I think you also see Daniel's influence in like new tutorial makers as well. Yeah, and one thing about, I think it would be sort of sad not to mention P5JS's community statement. That community statement is the one that I use in every single classroom that I have regardless of whether it's like a digital classroom or not. And it's, you know, community edited community really like kind of watched over in some ways to make sure that we're all sort of treating each other in a certain way. But that's also another way that you kind of judge the environment of a certain project too. Like, do they have a community statement? Is our folks easy to contact things like this? And you'll really, you know, get to know that like the flags and the vocabulary of certain communities that way. Well, that's great. Well, we are out of time unfortunately but I wanted to end the program with a little bit of a preview of a clip from the COSA Connector series. And I wanna thank you both. Shone and Chris, thank you for joining us. Thank you for talking about this work and really, you know, the generous spirit that goes into all of it and thinking about community and making things and putting things into the world. You know, I think this video clip is a really great place to stop because we've been talking about what are the ways you can contribute? And we just talked about Daniel Schiffman and the really wonderful things he has sort of kicked off with the kinds of tutorials he did. And so I think this is a great place to end it. Thank you both. And for folks who enjoyed this kind of program, we encourage you to tune in next week. Our guest will be Laura Zabel who will be talking to Victoria Rogers. And there are back issues and recordings of all of the programs that we've done over at kf.org slash discovery. And thanks to the team who helped produce this and everyone who's put work into the project. And so now just to leave you all with something really special here. This is from the COSA Connector Series. Hey, Shanae McLean-Halloy here. And I'm a new media artist and poet and just general kind of noise maker. And this is an episode of COSA Connectors. And this series, me and a few friends are showing off our favorite open source tools to make art with and just get generally creative. In addition to being a new media artist, I'm also a professor. So a lot of these tools are the same ones that I'm using in the classroom. Let me show you a few. All right, so today we're gonna be talking about twine. And twine, T-W-I-N-E, is a choose your own adventure game engine. This is also sometimes talked about as electronic literature and electronic literature and games both have been a part of computing history forever. And so I really cherish twine as a program that can both teach folks about the internet and its relationship to the printed book and the things that words and text really bring to the life of the internet. Twine provides a background of CSS and HTML. And you can really get really fancy with JavaScript and other kinds of coding languages. And the community, which is huge and it's really popular within queer gaming circles uses this on all levels. You'll see really popular games that are just text and a color all the way to full on experiences where things move across the page and music follows you wherever you go. The nice thing about twine is it's super beginner friendly whether you're an advanced programmer or someone who's never even been on the internet before there's gonna be something for you in this particular software. The thing about twine is because we're writing stories you don't necessarily have to deal with any of the code but other users that might be on the advanced side might wanna get into. So if you're working with a group it's a really great way to accommodate different skill levels. If you're a beginner you can really focus on your story and make sure that you have the best narrative possible and if you're advanced you can work with JavaScript and CSS to make sure that you have the right environment for that story. Twine is also really great for visual learners and those who are learning narrative structures because twine has both a story mode and a preview mode we get to understand how our code the stuff in the editor then functions visually in our story mode and how it's translated into preview mode. For those of us learning narrative structures we get to plan out exactly where we want our story to go. The interface is super flexible you get to move each of these little squares known as passages around the screen positioning them wherever you like. To use twine we can access it through an app or through the browser. Twine's information is always saved in the browser cache which means if you clear the cache or the memory that you store on your computer locally your story won't be there. Sometimes that's a little unstable but what it does is it creates a really agile workflow. Through the app you'll see that you can create libraries full of awesome stories to share. The role twine can play is to be able to give you agency and control over your story as folks on the other side of the computer screen interact with you but only on your terms. I said earlier that twine has a really beautiful thriving community. Well I'm thinking maybe this is why. Sometimes the games community relies on agency and choice to be able to share stories that reflect our values and desires. Twine also really brings a lot to the conversation of consent. Twine gives us those important conversations about consent and control that everybody in the technology world should think about. Great, thanks so much. Amazing thank you both so much and again thanks to the team for putting this together. What a wonderful way to end things and now I'm gonna go play with twine. I'm gonna go listen to Megan Listallian and Jamila Woods. So I uploaded the YouTube tutorial for my twine 1.1 so yesterday on YouTube so if you're very curious go watch my YouTube video. Don't judge me too hard. Awesome. Again thank you to our guests, Shanae and Chris and get out there, get coding, get making things and use open source tools. Have a great day everyone.