WORKSHOP AND OPEN LECTURE

The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera presents Code as Material: Creative Coding Foundations for Artistic and Design Practices, an intensive educational workshop dedicated to creative coding as an artistic and design practice, led by Lena Gieseke, Visiting Scholar and Professor of Image-based Media Technologies at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam.

The initiative is part of the PNRR INTAFAM IartNET project – an international platform for artistic research and cultural heritage at Italian higher arts education institutions, funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU, Mission 4, with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera as lead institution.

The workshop will take place from 16th to 20th March 2026, at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and will be accompanied by a public open lecture, scheduled for Wednesday 18th March from 12 PM to 2 PM, at the Centro Internazionale di Brera (CIB).

The initiative invites students to consider computation not as a tool to be mastered, but as a material to think and create with. Code is explored as an expressive medium capable of generating specific processes, aesthetics, and forms of authorship, and as a space for experimentation in which artistic and design thinking actively shape the structures of programming itself. From this perspective, creative coding becomes a field of research in which artistic practice and computational thinking mutually influence one another, opening up new possibilities for contemporary art and design.

Through theoretical lectures, hands-on exercises, and discussions, the workshop will provide the conceptual and practical foundations for understanding code as language, process, and material, fostering a critical and experimental approach to programming in artistic and design contexts.

Lecturer: Lena Gieseke is a Visiting Scholar and Professor of Image-based Media Technologies at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam. Her research focuses on the relationships between code, images, and contemporary artistic practices, with particular attention to creative coding, computational culture, and hybrid forms of audiovisual production.

Participants: The workshop is aimed at students of the Accademia interested in artistic and design practices related to computation, design, and new media.