Creativity and Technology
Marty gave me my weekly dose of motivation / gentle reminder to do my weekly post. I wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on a topic that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: the relationship between creativity and technology and the role that the two have played in my life.
This past Tuesday and Wednesday I lead the Making for Educators workshop at the Digital Harbor Foundation. This is one of our flagship workshops and is considered to be our “Making 101” where we cover lots of hands-on projects as well as discuss the benefits of maker education. The workshop cohort was excellent and there was a great air of excitement throughout the two day experience.
“Playing with Technology”
During the workshop we show a clip of Dale Dougherty’s TED Talk ‘We are Makers’ where he says that makers are “playing with technology.” That phrase has resonated with me ever since I first watched the TED Talk. I’ve recently been asked a lot about my background with regards to technology. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that the majority of my skill development has been a result of playing with various technologies.
When it comes to tech, I’m essentially completely self-taught. I didn’t study it in college, however I did have the opportunity to hone my audio production and digital media skills through co-hosting a radio show, and later becoming the Chief Announcer, at WLOY Loyola Radio. I was responsible for training new DJs on broadcasting and recording. During this period I had the opportunity to refine my audio tech skills while also discovering my passion for teaching others about technology. This period is one of the phases in my life where I refined my tech skills in a playful, fun way.
First Applications: Creating Scripts for MUDs
Looking back even further I realized that when I first began programming in middle school / high school, one of the first fields where I applied my skills was in creating bots/scripts for MUDs. A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) is a multi-player, text-based game which some consider to be spiritual precursors to the modern MMOs. There was lots of room for creating bots and scripts to augment the player experience since the games were text based.
I was drawn to the more competitive MUDs where any form of edge over other players was extremely beneficial. This is when I first began to apply my newly acquired programming skills. I’d create lots of scripts that did various tasks. The MUD client I used at the time (zMUD) supported a scripting language and I found that I greatly enjoyed exploring the syntax and concepts. Many of the scripts I made used conditional statements to trigger events and actions. Over time, I evolved to creating bots that would do a variety of tasks. I remember one point in highschool where I was working on creating a fully automated quest-bot for a particular GodWars MUD. I had no real reason to do this other than some of my friends were curious if it was possible.
While in college I played various MUDs off and on and some of the friends I made at that time were incredibly brilliant individuals who embodied the hacker attitude. We were always curious about the game systems and how we could push our knowledge to the limits. All of this was done in a playful context. However, at the time, the competition was incredibly serious!
Music Technology
When asked about how I developed my programming skills, I always respond that I’m self-taught. Through my college years I explored programming within the context of writing scripts and bots for text-based games. I now realize how these tasks were fantastic exercises in problem solving, especially problem solving with code!
Around this time, I was extremely active as a musician, composer, and audio engineer. I’d learned quite a lot about audio hardware over the years through experimentation and necessity. One of my earliest technology “wins” was when I first correctly routed audio signals with a patch bay! Looking back, I realize that these early experiments with audio hardware provided a solid foundation for understanding the basics of input and output!
The first piece of music/audio software that I deeply explored was Reason 2.0 and I further developed an understanding of signal processing and i/o because of the digital patching interface present in Reason. At the same time I was practicing my composition skills, I began experimenting with sound design. Through this process of playing with the signal paths, I refined my knowledge of waveforms, signal paths, and digital processing. As I’ve now worked with and taught Arduino and Raspberry Pi I realize how impactful those early explorations were. As a result of my audio experiments I had a basic understanding of i/o, signal processing, and waveforms . I just didn’t realize this until recently!
In my mind, this is one of the core benefits of playing with technology . The learning that occurs that may not be realized on the surface, but is deeply internalized.
[To be continued in a later post!]