The Center for Concrete and Abstract Machine and Peripheral Study is hosting a Chicago-based meeting of Processing Community Day in October 2026.

PCD Chicago 2026: EMERGENCE + IMPROVISATION:

CCAM and Peripheral Study will hold Processing Community Day on October 11th from 2-6pm at MANA Contemporary. In preparing this event, we began to wonder: what does it mean to convene a Processing community, and an art in technology more broadly, in Chicago? Instead of focusing on the technical know-how of creative code through workshops and tutorials, we envision PCD as a convening for collective imagining. What is the state of the art in Chicago, in an inflection point of accelerating technological development and artistic transformation? On the occasion of Processing’s 25th anniversary, we invite you to join a group of artists, educators, technologists, designers, and other practitioners to consider this question through a facilitated workshop and discussion.

Guided by the themes of Emergence and Improvisation, the event will bring together participants from across creative communities in Chicago for discussions, exchange, and community building. Additionally, participants will have the opportunity to share their computational artworks or ongoing projects made using tools such as p5.js.

Our ambition is to bring together groups and practitioners with different institutional affiliations, aesthetic approaches, and technical backgrounds to envision what a robust and well-supported computational art community might look like in Chicago.

Any questions can be sent to pcd@ccam.world