In my last semester at ITP, I enrolled in a class called 100 Days of Making. The task is to make something, anything, every day for 100 days in a row. No big projects being completed 1/100th of a piece at a time. And no waiting until Sunday to do seven pieces all at once.
My 100 days project is Creative Coding Communication Protocols. These are small creative coding programs, sketches, or patches that have some kind of communication protocol being implemented. The majority have been using MIDI, some with OSC, and more than a few combinations of using both at the same time.
You can find my Instagram of my 100 days here: https://www.instagram.com/dominicb_itp
And you can find the feed for the class here: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/100days_itp
At first, I definitely expected to investigate a breadth of protocols. But instead I wound up focusing more on a couple and then figuring out all the different ways they can be useful to a creative technologist. Having to commit to 100 days of anything really pushes you to become efficient and come up with lots and lots of ideas.
One purpose of this project for me was to serve as an educational resource to myself and future students or collaborators. Coming up with simple examples that clearly illustrate different aspects of a protocol will be good material to go back to.
Another purpose was utility. Leveraging different protocols can make different programs, platforms, software and hardware talk to each other much easier. For example, using MIDI in a browser lets you develop microcontroller/physical computing interfaces with no server/middleware in between. This can be useful for interface design and experimentation, or just making your development life easier.
And lastly was for artistic development. Many “simplistic” pieces of creative coding can be amplified by linking it to another piece of hardware or software. Not only finding the easiest ways to do that, but to really explore how many different ways we can imagine one thing talking to another. I’ve come up with many performative prototypes by going on this 100 days journey.