creative process

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, reflects on the pressure placed on artists to be geniuses. She proposes the older idea that creative people have a genius that visits them rather than being one.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

In a New York Times interview, Jerry Seinfeld describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke, still a work in progress, and shows his longhand writing process.

A 1979 BBC Nationwide report asking whether word processors and networked microprocessors could end office commuting. It shows early word processing and a woman working from home, with surprisingly prophetic predictions.

Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.

Andrew Sorensen's OSCON 2014 keynote in which he live-codes generative music on stage using his Impromptu environment while narrating his computational and musical choices. It imagines concert programmers as a performing art.

Adobe's VoCo demo from the MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele, showing software that changes words in a voiceover by typing new ones.

Louis CK speaks at a 2010 NYPL tribute to George Carlin about how Carlin's habit of discarding material and writing a new hour each year changed his own career. He becomes emotional describing it.

A short 'How It's Made' television segment showing the industrial process of turning canola seed into cooking oil. It walks through pressing, solvent extraction and refining steps.

mitxela shows his KiCad plugin that rounds PCB tracks to give circuit boards organic, melted-looking layouts instead of rigid geometric ones.

A five-minute clip of Ira Glass on the gap between good taste and early creative work. He says beginners know their work falls short and must keep producing to close the gap.

The first part of a long series documenting Dave Bull's Tokyo woodblock workshop as it produces a reproduction of Hokusai's The Great Wave. It follows the carving, proofing and printing of the reward print for Kickstarter backers.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

Technology Connections explains why the superheterodyne radio has its name and how mixing frequencies lets it tune stations well. It walks through the underlying wave phenomena and algebra and why the design solved a hard tuning problem.

The US Chemical Safety Board's updated animation of the 2005 BP Texas City refinery explosion, which killed 15 workers. It was released ahead of a process safety training application.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

Kurzgesagt addresses whether viewers can trust its videos, describing its research process and how it handles older videos with errors or overstated claims.

A 2007 clip in which immigration attorneys describe how they help employers run classified ads designed not to find qualified American applicants, so they can secure green cards for H-1B workers. It is presented as an exposé of the PERM process.

The 4K, 60fps version of Big Buck Bunny, the Creative Commons-licensed animated short film from the Blender Foundation.

Sintel is a 15-minute animated fantasy short made by the Blender Foundation to develop and showcase Blender, funded by community donations and released under Creative Commons.

Brian Peiris demonstrates RiftSketch, a web app where you write JavaScript with Three.js while wearing an Oculus Rift and watch the world around you change live. It runs on Firefox builds with WebVR.

Sebastian Lague explores an ant-inspired algorithm and simulates ant and slime mold behavior, using compute shaders. Source code for both simulations is available.

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.

Tom Scott-style exploration by suckerpinch (Tom7) of generalized anagrams where letters can be broken into pieces, called anagraphs, with a whimsical computational approach.

Chaos Theory is a 64k demoscene intro by Conspiracy and CNS that took second place at Assembly 2006, generating its graphics and music from a tiny executable.

Masagin is a realtime demoscene production by Farbrausch and Neuro with music by paniq, using animated recursive SVG graphics made in Inkscape. It is a psychedelic, nested-dials audiovisual piece.

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

A Tiny Desk concert in which pianist Dan Tepfer plays with a Disklavier player piano driven by a program he wrote that responds to his playing. He performs four pieces from his Natural Machines project.

The music video for Aphex Twin's T69 Collapse, directed by Weirdcore, with heavy strobing and glitchy audiovisual imagery. It is a track from the Collapse EP.

Inigo Quilez shows step by step how to build a simple heart shape from mathematics and shaders, with code on Shadertoy. It is an introduction to procedural graphics and signed distance functions.

The first part of a ShaderToy live-coding series that lays the groundwork for The Drive Home, a rainy night-traffic shader. It covers basic setup and builds toward rain and bokeh effects.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

A Mandelbrot set zoom animation reaching a magnification of about 2.1x10^275, claimed as the deepest at the time (January 2010). Each frame was rendered separately over six months on 12 CPU cores.

A recapture in 50fps HD of Spaceballs' 'State of the Art', an Amiga demo released at The Party 1992. It showcases the Amiga's real-time animation, graphics and music in a few minutes.

A six-minute journey through the layers of a neural network using Deep Dream, with each frame fed back into the network starting from random noise and the targeted layer changing every four seconds. It is set to downtempo music.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

Researchers from the Artificial Life Lab Graz introduce the Primordial Particle System, where a simple motion law for self-propelled particles produces cell-like structures that self-reproduce and show life cycles.

Viznut's third bytebeat video presents music generated by very short C programs and JavaScript expressions. It links to online tools and deeper analysis of one-line music.

A how-to video on datamoshing, the glitch-art technique of removing keyframes so that motion data smears across video. It walks through the tools needed, such as ffmpegx and Avidemux, though the author notes parts are outdated.