with Char Stiles and Monica Powell keynoting
The 2025 Virtual CC Fest opened with a warm welcome from Saber Khan, who invited attendees from around the world to greet one another in the chat. Teachers, artists, and coders joined from Los Angeles, Mumbai, Cambridge, Glasgow, Brooklyn, Izmir, and beyond. Many participants were attending for the first time, while others celebrated returning after earlier camps, building a sense of continuity and community. Saber framed CC Fest as a collective learning space — part festival, part professional development, and all about code, creativity, and connection.
Char Stiles opened the festival with a keynote that was both playful and philosophical, weaving together live coding, interactive media, and critical reflection on how we relate to technology. She began by situating her work at the intersection of art, code, and culture, describing coding not just as a technical practice, but as a way of seeing and reshaping the world.
Char introduced participants to her browser-based live coding environment, ide.charstiles.com, which allows anyone to experiment with visuals in real time. Through a live demo, she showed how a few simple lines of code could create dynamic, evolving visuals — an invitation to experience coding as improvisation rather than rigid problem-solving. This improvisational quality reflected her broader point: creative coding is a form of inquiry, where the process itself is as important as the product.
She then shifted to a more reflective mode, pointing out how coding can help us ask better questions about technology. In a world dominated by generative AI tools that produce neat, fluent outputs, she cautioned against the seduction of easy answers. Char emphasized the dangers of relying on “simple solutions” to complex human problems, urging educators and artists alike to use code as a medium for critical questioning and play.
Char closed by connecting creative coding to agency and imagination: coding gives us tools not only to build but also to challenge, remix, and reimagine the systems around us. Her keynote set the tone for the day — CC Fest as a space for experimentation, critical engagement, and joy.
🔗 Resources from Char’s talk: