Processing Community Day Chicago:Emergence and Improvisation

You’re invited to join Chicago Processing Community Day 2026 on October 11th from 2-6pm!

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 ecosystem might look like in Chicago.

Tentative Timetable

Any questions can be sent to pcd@ccam.world

Processing Community Day Chicago 2026 is organized by Maddie Brucker, Grace Grace Grace, and Cassie Tarakajian, and hosted by Peripheral Study and The Center for Concrete and Abstract Machine.