Orienting to creative coding: what it is and why you code visuals

Before you can perform visuals at an algorave or build a home audio-visual rig, you need a stance: why write code at all when VJ software and video apps exist? This module builds toward that stance made concrete — a manifesto backed by two running hello-world sketches, one in p5.js and one in Hydra, launched from a setup that actually works. That pairing mirrors real practice: browser-first tools dominate visual live coding precisely because they collapse the gap between typing and seeing.

The arc starts with framing. Read how creative coding aims at expression rather than function, and how writing personal software escapes the fixed palette of commercial tools — these give your manifesto its argument. Then survey the two environments: p5.js as the visual-first heir to Processing’s accessibility mission, and Hydra as a browser-native video synthesizer of chainable signal sources and transforms. Your first exercises are supported: paste a sketch into the p5.js web editor, chain an osc().out() in Hydra, and use the tutorial catalog to route yourself to a leveled lesson. The unsupported step is getting a local setup running — where the local-server requirement for p5.js is the classic gotcha that turns a blank canvas into a working sketch — and then deliberately entering the doing-observing-adjusting loop that Victor’s immediate-feedback principle and Sandin’s feedback-loop practice method describe.

Every required atom gates the capstone: the framing atoms supply the manifesto’s substance, the tool atoms justify your annotated choice, and the setup and feedback-loop atoms make the sketches actually run and iterate. The supporting atoms enrich rather than gate — language choice anxiety, the Nature of Code as a next destination, versioning habits for bold experimentation, and Victor’s circuit-visualization example deepening the feedback principle.