Meet Rita
Rita Eperjesi is an artist, architect, and a creative technologist that has been a part of our community since early days! We’re excited to have her teaching her first course at School of Machines, with the upcoming 8-week online course, A Friendly Introduction to Creative Coding through Analogue Techniques!
Hi Rita, thanks for joining me for this interview! You have been in our School of Machines community since forever. In fact, we met at one of our events connecting humans and machines in which we were asked to hold a Madagascar Hissing Beatle in our hands as an exercise in overcoming fear. Why did you ever come back? Lol.
Ah yes, that was a funny event. It was about learning why we are afraid of bugs, and around that time I had a spider in my bathroom that I was very afraid of. In the workshop it seemed like nobody else was scared of the huge cockroach, only you and me, so we were holding hands while letting that bug run through our hands for 2 seconds. Probably this experience bonded us for a lifetime.
You have taken part in a couple of our summer intensive programs and exhibitions and made really cool things! Do you have a favourite project you care to talk about? Perhaps one that helped you explore a topic in a new light?
My all time favorite is probably the first course I took, called See or Be Seen, which was about computer vision. I always had weird ideas in my head, but never knew how to make them, so learning about openFrameworks and making interactive things was mindblowing.
My final project was called the Cloud Factory, where you could lay down on a mattress and draw clouds on the projected sky above you. I’d been thinking about creating a cloud factory a lot before already. I find the sky fascinating, that it is always there in our eyesight, but we can never touch it. Not just me, but also humanity. I’m kind of surprised that the sky is not yet used as a screen for advertisements.
So as a thought-experiment, I wanted to design a cloud factory as my architecture thesis. I was thinking about how to draw clouds, and how the easiest solution could be to control the temperature, humidity and pressure of every cubic meter of the sky, so we could just turn clouds on and off on each 3D pixel.
Anyway, I was very happy to be able to create a prototype for my dystopian future vision.
Your work is so creative and notable. You are often the example that comes to mind when talking with an artist who fears they will join a class and feel embarrassed because their project isn’t as cool as everyone else’s. Your projects are always cool because you generally favour ideas that are also personal explorations of concepts that have been floating around in your head for awhile. What do you have to say about the importance of creativity in your own work and not just making tech exercises?
I’m a big believer in concepts and finding the cleanest ways to express them. I’ve been working in advertising (yeah, I know, capitalism is evil and everything, and I agree), but what is great about this field is that ideas are the most celebrated things. They have to be very straightforward, so anybody can understand them in a very very very short time, and they need to be very surprising, otherwise nobody even looks at them.
I learned to cold heartedly throw out ideas that are just not good enough, and to throw out every element of a project that is not needed to communicate my message. So probably this is what makes my artworks relatable - I really want you to understand me.
So answering your question: I am really bad at doing tech exercises, the results are most of the time not cool at all, and I am not even too motivated to do them. But once I find a way to use a piece of technology to express a concept that I’ve been chewing in my brain for a long time, I get excited and I can create things. And in that case what you see and appreciate is the concept which took months or years of thinking, not the technology or the execution.
Eventually you went on to study creative technology in university and now you have a degree and even a fancy book! How will your upcoming class reflect all your varied experiences? What are you most looking forward to in teaching?
I took many different classes with many different teachers, and they were all very great. However, I felt that for my brain, maybe slower methods could be more useful. I guess it is tricky with teaching, that if you are very good in your field - in this case coding - the basics become so natural for you that it is hard to understand how people might struggle with a concept. I also felt that all this coding world is very rigid and cold, and the friendliest element is the flower emoji in the p5 error messages.
For my master thesis I chose the topic of creative coding education. When I looked into the history of code, I found it very exciting that originally coders were mostly women, they were even advertising becoming a Computer Girl in Cosmopolitan in 1967. They said coding is just like planning a dinner.
Images from Rita's book DECODE
If we look around now in the tech world, clearly things have changed. The white nerd antisocial developer guy stereotype can work kind of like a self fulfilling prophecy, it is harder to feel self-confident in this environment if you don’t fit this stereotype.
I was always in very very friendly and welcoming learning environments, so I really can't complain, but I also see that if somebody is not so lucky, it is very easy to lose your self-confidence quickly and abandon coding too early.
That’s why I believe that a very soft introduction is important. If you feel you are capable of solving problems and you have faith in yourself, you can probably figure out solutions for any problem.
Are there some common issues that beginner programmers run into?
As a research for my thesis I did interviews with creative coders about how they learned to code, and I identified some common pain points. Error messages seem to be the worst enemies of beginner coders, and so is syntax. When somebody feels alone with their problems, that's most likely when they give up, so having a supporting community can also be a key. And having too abstract problems and explanations can be also off putting. It is hard to keep being motivated when you can’t relate to what you are doing.
Life in Plastic (2024)
I created the course keeping these things in mind. We use an analog book to keep the error messages away, we read code first and start writing code later, so we have time to get used to the syntax. It is a class with fellow humans, so you are not alone with any problem, and I try to explain programming concepts with everyday examples that anybody can relate to.
So how do we go from pen and paper to coding on the computer?
A big part of coding is thinking about your process, and how to divide your big problem into smaller and easily solvable problems. For this part, you don’t really need a computer, you can refine your strategy on a piece of paper.
When it comes to writing code, beginners tend to have a problem with getting accustomed to the formalities of the programming languages (for example putting a ; at the end of a line), they run into a forest of error messages because of the tiny syntax mistakes, and even though their thinking was good, they feel discouraged by constantly being stopped from proceeding. So we start with reading code in the book, understanding it, and making drawings - exactly what our computer would be doing when we are writing code on the p5 website. I believe after practicing the “thinking” of the computer in the physical world, writing code will be a lot easier.
There is a beauty in creating generative drawings on the computer, where you can draw twenty circles with a click, but drawing the same graphic by hand once can help to learn the logic for a lifetime. And it is also quite a meditative activity - at least for me.
We will create pretty digital sketches on the openprocessing website, but as a start we will always try to get familiar with the code on paper. At the end of the course you will be able to read, modify and write p5 sketches to create beautiful digital visuals.
You also do carpet making among other things. What do these analog activities mean for you and your digital work? Is there a relationship there?
Real-time war rug (see below for more info)
I feel that staring at screens is very bad for my mental health. I do it a lot, I feel addicted. Unfortunately, it feels amazing for my fingers to scroll, these devices are designed too well. So I’m trying to find activities to take some breaks from the pixels. Going back to what I enjoyed as a kid seems to be an easier direction. In primary school I wanted to be a fashion designer, so learning about textiles seemed like a logical step, that’s how my rug making started. I find it very entertaining to create computer generated graphics and fuck them up with my little human hands by making them a real object.
Another analog activity I find fun is to scan things, so I play a lot with real objects and get digital images from them - this is a quite useful hack as a designer. I used scanning to create all the graphics in the book that we'll be using for the course.
I also practice ballet which I did as a kid, too. I’m really not good at it, but I also find joy in this. I find it fascinating that at each exercise the teacher just tells you the algorithm of the choreography (2 demi-plié, 1 grand-plié, 1 relevé, in 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th position) and if you know the rules of ballet, you can just execute the code.
Luckily, at my age there is no real danger of becoming a professional ballet dancer, so I can take the freedom to make mistakes in the execution.
Project Info
The Cloud Factory
2017. at School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe groupshow: See or Be Seen
Singing Dishes
2017. Project made with Christian Kokott for the Make Some Noise: School of Machines Community Showcase
Go on.
at School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe groupshow: Ask Something as part of Transmediale Vorspiel 2017, Berlin.
Our task was to come up with a question that the visitors can answer at the exhibition.
This is my installation, I was curious about how people are dealing with breakups.
Real-time war rug
The real-time war rug is a tangible and audiovisual display of the ongoing socio-political conflicts through the medium of war rugs. We would like to use this soft reminder to draw attention to all conflicts happening around us and the interconnected nature of our eco-system.
@Fanni Szilvás @Anna Eschenbacher @Zainab Tariq @Julieta Iacono @Elian Stolarsky @Gabriella Paredes @Leslie Portillo Pérez @Pei-Chi Lee
Life in Plastic
2024. 48 Stunden Neukölln
@Christian Kokott @Ariel Doron
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To learn more about Rita’s work, visit:
https://www.rita.cloud/
@ritaeperjesi
For more information about Rita’s upcoming online course, A Friendly Introduction to Creative Coding through Analogue Techniques, which begins 30. October at School of Machines, click here.