Creative Coding in Python

A proposal that we think about digital technologies such as machine learning not in terms of artificial intelligence but as artificial communication.Algorithms that work with deep learning and big data are getting so much better at doing so many things that it makes us uncomfortable. How can a device know what our favorite songs are, or what we should write in an email? Have machines become too smart? In Artificial Communication, Elena Esposito argues that drawing this sort of analogy between algorithms and human intelligence is misleading. If machines contribute to social intelligence, it will not be because they have learned how to think like us but because we have learned how to communicate with them. Esposito proposes that we think of “smart” machines not in terms of artificial intelligence but in terms of artificial communication.To do this, we need a concept of communication that can take into account the possibility that a communication partner may be not a human being but an al

One of today's most widely read philosophers considers the shift in violence from visible to invisible, from negativity to excess of positivity.Some things never disappear -- violence, for example. Vi

Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm,

Software development would seem to be a quintessential example of today'sInternet-enabled "knowledge work"--a global profession not bound by the constraints ofgeography. In Coding Places, Yuri Takhtey

This book introduces students with little or no prior programming experience to the art of computational problem solving using Python and various Python libraries, including PyLab. It provides student

A new and extensively revised edition of a popular textbook used in universities, coding boot camps, hacker clubs, and online courses.The best way to understand how computers work is to build one from

A textbook for students with limited background in mathematics and computer coding, emphasizing computer tutorials that guide readers in producing models of neural behavior.This introductory text teac

More than fifty years ago, Joseph Schumpeter stated that processes intrinsic to a capitalist society produce a "creative destruction," whereby innovations destroy obsolete technologies, only to be ass

Coding for a purpose: helping young people combine journalism, data, design, and code to make media that makes a difference.Educators are urged to teach “code for all”―to make a specialized field accessible for students usually excluded from it. In Code for What? Clifford Lee and Elisabeth Soep instead ask the question, “code for what?” What if coding were a justice-driven medium for storytelling rather than a narrow technical skill? What if “democratizing” computer science went beyond the usual one-off workshop and empowered youth to create digital products for social impact? Lee and Soep answer these questions with stories of a diverse group of young people in Oakland, California, who combine journalism, data, design, and code to create media that make a difference. These teenage and young adult producers created interactive projects that explored gendered and racialized dress code policies in schools; designed tools for LBGTQ+ youth experiencing discrimination; investigated facial r

Coding, once considered an arcane craft practiced by solitary techies, is now recognized by educators and theorists as a crucial skill, even a new literacy, for all child

Coding, once considered an arcane craft practiced by solitary techies, is nowrecognized by educators and theorists as a crucial skill, even a new literacy, for all children.Programming is often promot

This first book by the author of Zen and the Brain examines the role of chance in the creative process. James Austin tells a personal story of the ways in which persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research; the conclusions he reaches shed light on the creative process in any field.Austin shows how, in his own investigations, unpredictable events shaped the outcome of his research and brought about novel results. He then goes beyond this story of serendipity to propose a new classification of the varieties of chance, drawing on his own research and examples from the history of science--including the famous accidents that led Fleming to the discovery of penicillin. Finally, he explores the nature of the creative process, considering not only the environmental and neurophysiological correlates of creativity but also the role of intuition in both scientific discoveries and spiritual quests. This updated MIT Press paperback edition includes a new introduction and rece

This is a complete presentation of all important theoretical and experimental workdone on low-density codes. Low-density coding is one of the three techniques thus far developed forefficient communica

Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative -- and hence unanalyzable -- whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascin

More than sixty speculative art and design projects explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes.In the Age of the Anthropocene―a era characterized by human-caused climate disaster―catastrophes and dystopias loom. The Anthropocene Cookbook takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to seize the moment to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises? How can we thrive? The Anthropocene Cookbook answers these questions by presenting a series of investigative art and design projects that explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes. This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity’s survival. These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the h

How the world―and the world of visual culture in particular―creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.How does the world form itself? How does it create itself as a world? And how

An investigation of independent video games—creative, personal, strange, and experimental—and their claims to handcrafted authenticity in a purely digital medium.Video games are often dismissed as mer

How the creative abundance of today's media culture was made possible by the decline of elitism in the arts and the rise of digital media.Media culture today encompasses a universe of forms—websites,

How to confront, embrace, and learn from the unavoidable failures of creative practice; with case studies that range from winemaking to animation. Failure is an inevitable part of any creative practic

Life hacking as self-help for the creative class in the digital age: using systems in pursuit of health, wealth, and productivity.Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep

How humans and technology evolve together in a creative partnership.In this book, Edward Ashford Lee makes a bold claim: that the creators of digital technology have an unsurpassed medium for creativi

How lessons from kindergarten can help everyone develop the creative thinking skills needed to thrive in today's society.In kindergartens these days, children spend more time with math worksheets and

Focusing on early social media in the arts and humanities and on the core role of creative computer scientists, artists, and scholars in shaping the pre-Web social media

The risks of climate change are potentially immense. The benefits of taking action are also clear: we can see that economic development, reduced emissions, and creative adaptation go hand in hand. A c

This book takes a single line of code--the extremely concise BASIC program for theCommodore 64 inscribed in the title--and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenonof creative computi

This book talks about skin as boundary and surface, metaphorically and physically: creative and critical perspectives on skin and bodily transformation as it intersects with digital technologies. In "

In Shape, George Stiny argues that seeing shapes -- with all their changeability andambiguity -- is an inexhaustible source of creative ideas. Understanding shapes, he says, is auseful way to understa

Users have become an integral part of technology studies. The essays in this volume look at the creative capacity of users to shape technology in all phases, from design to implementation. Using a va

Users have become an integral part of technology studies. The essays in this volume look at the creative capacity of users to shape technology in all phases, from design to implementation. Using a var

Founded in 1540, the Society of Jesus was viewed for centuries as an impediment to the development of modern science. The Jesuit educational system was deemed conservative and antithetical to creative

Visual calculating in shape grammars aligns with art and design, bridging the gap between seeing (Coleridge’s “imagination”) and combinatoric play (Coleridge’s “fancy”).In Shapes of Imagination, George Stiny runs visual calculating in shape grammars through art and design―incorporating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetic imagination and Oscar Wilde’s challenging corollary to see things as in themselves they really are not. Many assume that calculating limits art and design to suit computers, but shape grammars rely on seeing to prove otherwise. Rules that change what they see extend calculating to overtake what computers can do, in logic and with data and learning. Shape grammars bridge the categorical divide between seeing (Coleridge’s “imagination, or esemplastic power”) and combinatoric play (Coleridge’s “fancy”). Stiny shows that calculating without seeing excludes art and design. Seeing is key for calculating to augment creative activity with aesthetic insight and value. Shape gramma

An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity.In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city.These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Sm

Why today’s complex problems demand a radically new way of thinking―one in which art, technology, and science converge. Today’s complex problems demand a radically new way of thinking―one in which art, technology, and science converge to expand our creativity and augment our insight. Creativity must be combined with the ability to execute; the innovators of the future will have to understand this balance and manage such complexities as climate change and pandemics. The place of this convergence is the Nexus. In this provocative and visually striking book, Julio Mario Ottino and Bruce Mau offer a guide for navigating the intersections of art, technology, and science. The Nexus brings together word and image to prepare us―individuals and organizations alike―for the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. Compelling historic examples illuminate the present, from the Renaissance, when the domains were one, to the twentieth century, with intense, collective creative out

An exploration of echo not as simple repetition but as an agent of creative possibilities.In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amit Pinchevski proposes that echo is not simple repetition and the reproduction of sameness but an agent of change and a source of creation and creativity. Pinchevski views echo as a medium, connecting and mediating across and between disparate domains. He reminds us that the mythological Echo, sentenced by Juno to repeat the last words of others, found a way to make repetition expressive. So too does echo introduce variation into sameness, mediating between self and other, inside and outside, known and unknown, near and far. Echo has the potential to bring back something unexpected, either more or less than what was sent. Pinchevski distinguishes echo from the closely related but sometimes conflated reflection, reverberation, and resonance; considers echolalia as an active, reactive, and creative vocalic force, the launching pad of sp

A diverse group of teenage friends learn how computing can be personally and politically empowering and why all students need access to computer science education.This lively graphic novel follows a diverse group of teenage friends as they discover that computing can be fun, creative, and empowering. Taylor, Christine, Antonio, and Jon seem like typical young teens―they communicate via endless texting, they share jokes, they worry about starting high school, and they have each other’s backs. But when a Black man is shot and killed by police in their city, they are outraged―and then they learn that he had been misidentified and tracked by an artificial intelligence program. How can an algorithm be racist? And what is an algorithm, anyway? In school, they decide to explore computing classes, with mixed results. One class is only about typing. The class that Christine wants to join is full, and the school counselor suggests that she take a class in “Tourism and Hospitality” instead. (R

How design collaboration, networks, and narratives contributed to the establishment of a recognized English couture industry in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s and 1940s, English fashion houses, spurred by economic and wartime crises, put London on the map as a major fashion city. In this book, Michelle Jones examines the creation of a London-based couture industry during these years, exploring how designer collaboration and the construction of specific networks and narratives supported and shaped the English fashion economy. Haute couture―the practice of creative made-to-measure womenswear―was widely regarded as inherently French. Jones shows how an English version emerged during a period of economic turbulence, when a group of designers banded together in a collective effort to shift power within the international fashion system. Jones considers the establishment of this form of English design practice, analyzing the commercial, social, and political factors that shaped the prof

Rethinking design through the lens of embodied cognition provides a novel way of understanding human interaction with technology. In this book, Christopher Baber uses embodied cognition as a lens through which to view both how designers engage in creative practices and how people use designed artifacts. This view of cognition as enactive, embedded, situated, or distributed, without recourse to internal representations, provides a theoretical grounding that makes possible a richer account of human interaction with technology. This understanding of everyday interactions with things in the world reveals opportunities for design to intervene. Moreover, Baber argues, design is an embodied activity in which the continual engagement between designers and their materials is at the heart of design practice. Baber proposes that design and creativity should be considered in dynamic, rather than discrete, terms and explores “task ecologies”―the concept of environment as it relates to embodied

A practice-based guide to applying the principles of human-centered design to real-world health challenges; updated and expanded with post–COVID-19 innovations. This book offers a practice-based guide to applying the principles of human-centered design to real-world health challenges that range from drug packaging to breast cancer detection. Written by pioneers in the field―Bon Ku, a physician leader in innovative health design, and Ellen Lupton, an award-winning graphic designer―the book outlines the fundamentals of design thinking and highlights important products, prototypes, and research in health design. This revised and expanded edition describes innovations developed in response to the COVID-19 crisis, including an intensive care unit in a shipping container, a rolling cart with intubation equipment, and a mask brace that gives a surgical mask a tighter seal. The book explores the special overlap of health care and the creative process, describing the development of such prod

Hackers as vital disruptors, inspiring a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens take back democracy.Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure.

The creative collaborations of engineers, artists, scientists, and curators over the past fifty years.Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural real