Creative Coding at Reasons to be Appy

On Tuesday, I attended Reasons to be Appy, a one-day event for designers and developers held in the spectacular LSO at St Luke’s, Old Street. The day consisted of a series of fascinating talks, demos and games on topics relating to design, code and creativity.

The keynote talk came from the talented Peter Gregson, a classically trained cellist who is attempting to bring chamber music into the 21st century. Fed up with playing “300-year-old music on a 200-year-old instrument to a 100-year-old audience”, Peter set about finding a way to incorporate digital into his performances without compromising his musicianship.

The result is goPlay – an app developed in conjunction with Reactify Music which simply “listens and responds”. We were treated to a stunningly beautiful demonstration and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Another highlight was Seb Lee-Delisle’s demonstration of his PixelPhones project, where the audience became the stars of the show. We all enthusiastically raised our phones as Seb converted each display to one individual pixel of colour; he then used the resulting audience screen to display images and animations (accompanied by an audience soundtrack of oohs and aahs). We even got a chance to try to catch Nyan Cat as he ran across each of our screens.

The day was rounded off perfectly by Brendan Dawes’ impassioned plea to “escape Flatland” and add texture to digital. There was a huge range of content discussed throughout the day, but listening to Brendan helped me to reflect on a theme that kept popping up throughout: stop reaching for perfection and learn to embrace accidents and flaws – make digital human.