Exploring different mediums is an essential part of an art education. You will never know what kinds of art you can make without learning and using different materials. But what about technology? Computers? Code and servers?

I’d never really considered technology to be an art material beyond a "traditional" digital art program, one that mimicked physical drawing until this semester. Never did I think I would consider code an art material. However, the material inquiries we did in this class greatly challenged how I thought about art materials. It made me think, why didn’t I consider code an art material?

The material inquiry Server as sketchbook seemed very interesting, but also very scary. This inquiry was about learning to code in HTML and using a server to put what you’ve made online. I’d chosen this inquiry to test myself. I’d never coded something before, except for a small animation I made in Scratch. Scratch had made me a little less scared of code as a material, but it was still very different from the text format of HTML.

I was given a short explanation of the inquiry and then let loose, as this was a very independent exploration. It was up to me to dig into coding and make art with it. What I had found surprised me greatly. I loved to code. It was fun and exciting exploring this new material. The reward of figuring out a line of code was able to be seen on the server and it was out in the world for everyone to see as well. It was like the world of art had expanded greatly for me. Ideas were constantly rushing through my head of what I could do next and what I could learn. I’d ended up making a silly little website that linked to another page I’d made.

It seems so strange to me now that code isn’t considered an art material, because what else was I doing with it but making art? My perspective has been changed a lot by this class, not only about what you can make art with, but how to teach this new perspective.

I’ve still got a lot to learn when it comes to art education, but a good place to start was Mitchel Resnick’s “Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play”. Something that stood out to me, based on childhood and recent experiences, was the section on the importance of peers.

I’ve written about my experience with peers in a reading response, because it was such an important part of my art journey, especially early on. Seeing others make art inspires me to make art, and sharing that art and techniques was incredibly rewarding for everyone involved. This was true for Scratch and the server as sketchbook material inquiry. I would never have gotten as far as I have as an artist or a person without my peers.

The most impactful lessons of this semester for me was opening my mind to different art materials such as code, and the importance of peers. Sharing knowledge, whether it is a watercolor technique, or an online forum to help people who are stuck on a line of code, is a crucial part of art education.