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Fliers designed by Francisca José
Event Recap & Session Notes
Virtual CC Fest on March 21, 2026 opened with Saber Khan acknowledging the overlapping significance of the day — Eid for some in the community, Nowruz for others, the arrival of spring more broadly — before inviting participants to introduce themselves and settle in. Within minutes the space filled with voices from Roskilde, Brighton, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Izmir, Seattle, Culver City, Corvallis, and Brooklyn. M DeNardo opened with "Happy EID Happy Nowruz !!" and Ryan Lay followed with "Happy Nowruz!" Several people introduced themselves as first-timers. Others, like Randy, noted it was their third virtual CC Fest. Francisca José who designed the fliers also volunteered to support the event.
Kit Kuksenok's keynote (Are.na collection) extended that framing with a reflection on creativity, learning, and the evolving role of code as an artistic medium. A central idea: learning is less about retaining every detail and more about expanding one's sense of what is possible. Even after decades of experience, Kit described still feeling like a beginner — offering a model of expertise grounded not in mastery as finality, but in ongoing curiosity, humility, and experimentation.
Through examples from their own practice, including revisiting No Exit, a project first made as a beginner experiment in the late 1990s and later revisited as a performance work, Kit showed how old code can be reencountered as both artifact and inspiration. Friction, glitches, and system behavior that resists intention were framed not as failures to overcome, but as materials to work with.
The closing session brought the community back together for a keynote by Anil Dash, who traced a personal and collective history of making — from early home computers and constrained systems to his leadership at Glitch, a platform designed to make coding accessible, collaborative, and playful. Learning happened through tinkering, experimentation, and direct engagement with the machine. That lineage, he argued, is worth preserving.
The chat became a shared archive. Randy's VIC-20 connected to a cassette recorder. Johnny's TRS-80 Model III and Commodore 128. Kris's Atari 800 with a floppy drive that cost more than the computer. Pedro's ZX Spectrum 48k with a green monitor. And Stig Møller Hansen's Amiga 500: "I did some digital archaeology on it last week and managed to extract a bunch of stuff I made nearly 40 years ago. I almost cried." For many, recovering old work was not just technical — it was an encounter with a past version of themselves.