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CCAM: Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines

@ccam_chicago

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nomadic artist-run platform developing culture at the nexus of art, technics, and contemporary thought

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CCAM School and ALMANAC are excited to announce a four-part in-person workshop series with incredibly exciting artists and creators working with technology!

Save the dates. Capped at 20 seats. Registration opens soon.

July 2nd: Maddie Brucker + Peripheral Study (CHI) // “Deconstructing the Image” creative coding with p5.js at Mouse Arts and Letters Club in Bridgeport peripheral___ (personal account); @peripheral_study

July 27th: Claire Fleming Stapes (CHI) // “New Virtual Worlds” Virtual Reality with New Art City at ALMANAC in Humboldt Park

August 15th: CodeMoves (SF/CHI) // “Body, Space, Time” Movement and software with CodeMoves at ALMANAC in Humboldt Park @framingmovessf @miryam.gabrielle @eamorck @l.bedal

September 21st: Zoe Butler (CHI) // “Virtuals Mas” P5.js and Blender City at ALMANAC in Humboldt Park @pixiebreeder by @ccam_chicago

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4 months ago

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a day ago

Registration is now OPEN for the workshop Body, Space, Time” Movement and software with CodeMoves (SF/CHI) at ELASTIC ARTS @elasticarts @framingmovessf @miryam.gabrielle @eamorck @l.bedal

October 17th, 2-4pm @ Elastic Arts in Logan Square

This workshop explores how software built in a community setting can support and deepen the choreographic process. Designed for movement artists, this workshop will allow participants to use, move with, and iterate on custom-built software tools (e.g. video mixing, spatial interactions) to help them deepen their inquiry on a topic of choice, while understanding their own interests and boundaries around technology use in their practice. We will end in a demonstration of explorations and community discussion. No coding, tech, or movement experience necessary.

This workshop is an extension of the CodeMoves initiative by The Movement Project, aimed at weaving technology into the creative practice. (learn more here: **https://www.codemoves.studio/**) CodeMoves was selected as a 2024 Knight New Work grantee, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that supports artists and organizations in Akron, Miami, and Detroit who are using technology to innovate how art is created, shared, and experienced.

Artist Bio

Elyse Morckel, Lauren Bedal, Miryam Gabrielle, and Varsha Iyengar are movement artists and creative technologists collaborating under CodeMoves. CodeMoves is an initiative of The Movement Project and core collaborators found here: https://www.themovementproject.org/codemoves by @ccam_chicago

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7 days ago

You’re invited to join Chicago Processing Community Day 2026 on October 11th from 2-6pm in Pilsen at Mana Contemporary.

RSVP at link in bio!

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.

Tentative timetable
2-4:30pm Facilitated Collaborative Workshop on the past, present, and future of art, technology, and culture in Chicago.
4:30 -5:30pm Light Meal + Pecha Kucha style lightning talks (please RSVP on form to participate!
5:30-6:00pm Conversation and Exchange

RSVP at link in bio 🔗!

Processing Community Day Chicago 2026 is organized by Maddie Brucker @peripheral____ , Grace Grace Grace @diagrammatic.media , and Cassie Tarakajian @hellothisiscass , and hosted by Peripheral Study @peripheral_study and CCAM, the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines @ccam_chicago by @ccam_chicago

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9 days ago

You’re invited to join Chicago Processing Community Day 2026 on October 11th from 2-6pm in Pilsen at Mana Contemporary.

RSVP at link in bio!

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.

Tentative timetable
2-4:30pm Facilitated Collaborative Workshop on the past, present, and future of art, technology, and culture in Chicago.
4:30 -5:30pm Light Meal + Pecha Kucha style lightning talks (please RSVP on form to participate!
5:30-6:00pm Conversation and Exchange

RSVP at link in bio 🔗!

Processing Community Day Chicago 2026 is organized by Maddie Brucker @peripheral____ , Grace Grace Grace @diagrammatic.media , and Cassie Tarakajian @hellothisiscass , and hosted by Peripheral Study @peripheral_study and CCAM, the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines @ccam_chicago taken in Mana Contemporary by @ccam_chicago

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a month ago

Mark your calendars: the @ccam_chicago reading group returns to form on September 13 at MANA Contemporary in Chicago, featuring a series of readings that inspired our futurhythmachines project.

In "More Brilliant Than the Sun," Kodwo Eshun identifies breakbeat producers, instrumental turntablists, and mixadelic engineers as already-operating sonic theorists, activating thought at the speed of sound. Taking his propositions seriously, @ccam_chicago & @bads_lab ’s futurhythmachines project approaches social forms and expressive technics through investigations and experiments in the making(s) of Black electronic dance musics. This reading group takes up some of the project’s fundamental source texts—works by Eshun, Goodman, Henriques, and Brar—alongside BADS_lab’s own theory and practice notes.

Follow the link in bio to read more and RSVP.

photo credit: @isaiahwrd
photo subject: @errrantry on the decks at the BADS_lab open session this past June. by @ccam_chicago

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2 months ago

We are excited for another workshop in our CCAM School series! This workshop will be in person and online, please register at https://ccam.world/programs/26-09-16-zoe-butler-virtual-mas/ to reserve your spot and access the link. Cost is $20 which helps us pay the artists! Email us if you need a fee waiver.

Virtual Mas is a studio workshop grounded in the traditions of Caribbean performance and philosophy. The class invites participants to think together about masquerade as an emancipatory ethos, a technique of artful struggle, expression of identity as well as a resistance to visibility, through a shared process of digital mask making using P5.js and Blender.

Zoe Butler is a New Media Performance Artist who uses abstract moving images to engage and expand Guyanese folktales. Butler is a 2023-24 Fulbright Research Fellowship recipient, affiliated with The University of the West Indies, Saint Augustine Trinidad and Tobago. Her ongoing project titled Conversations and Constellations is a body of creative research exploring Caribbean oral traditions and the histories from which they emerge, to encourage the continued exchange of storytelling. taken in Mana Contemporary by @ccam_chicago

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2 months ago

Excited to teach this workshop, available to anyone of any skill level interested in learning how to work in @newart.city, an accessible online platform for building navigable virtual worlds. $20, DM for fee waiver.
6-8 pm July 27th MANA Contemporary 5th floor Cafe.
Register at https://ccam.world/programs/26-07-27-claire-fleming-staples-almanac/

Last slide is a world made by my student Joann Le Tran. taken in Mana Contemporary by @ccam_chicago

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3 months ago

Catch CCAM tomorrow from 12-6 at @esschicago ‘s Experimental Garage Sale! We will be tabling, selling some synth prototypes, zines, and demo’ing our Estuary eurorack system in advance of a Winter 26/27 course at ESS! taken in Experimental Sound Studio by @ccam_chicago

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MDW Detroit ! CCAM had an incredible time meeting new friends and reconnecting with old at MDW 2026, a gathering of artist run projects across the Midwest at @bulk_space in Detroit last week.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth and picked up zines, shirts, tried out synths and chatted. We are extremely excited to stay in touch and to collaborate with so many important projects across the Midwest. We workshopped, talked together, ate together, danced together.

Thanks so much to each and every person who organized this incredible catalyst of solidarity, learning, and collaboration. So excited for 2028 in Cincinnati at @parprojects !

Interspersed are a few photos of @drwngdrwng ‘s fantastic show “we tricked rocks to think” , folks jamming our Estuary synths (thanks for letting us photo, dm us for a tag!), a night at extremely bumping Spot Lite for their closing weekend, and Grace at the CCAM table. taken in Detroit, Michigan by @ccam_chicago

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3 months ago

Registration is OPEN at LINK 🔗 in BIO

for Maddie Brucker/Peripheral Study’s (CHI) “Deconstructing the Image” workshop with p5.js @p5xjs

July 2nd, 6-8pm in Bridgeport, Chicago at Mouse Arts and Letters Club @mouseartsandletters

In an era in which we are bombarded with more digital images than ever, how can we resist the paradigm of doomscrolling and AI slop forced upon us? Perhaps we might start by examining what makes the “seamless” consumption of digital media possible. This introductory workshop on creative coding and image processing takes a low-level approach, exploring the protocols and algorithms underpinning the interfaces of our social media feeds. Using the p5.js programming language, we will learn how computers store, transmit, and display images, and create our own poetic image algorithms.

Maddie Brucker is an artist, designer, and researcher based in Chicago. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Computer Science + Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. peripheral___ (personal account); @peripheral_study taken in Mouse Arts and Letters Club by @ccam_chicago

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4 months ago

Five Sundays in May at The Land School, again and again, gathering with people willing to think and talk and make.

To every one of you who showed up: thank you. I put the lab notebook together in your company, and it carries your fingerprints.

This Saturday, that notebook goes home with whoever comes through the door.

It holds the fragments of the process poetically juxtaposed: questions asked, hypotheses floated, methods tried, residues we couldn't help but leave behind, texts that entered the conversations, and exercises we ran.

And you won't only read about the exercises, you'll get to try them yourself alongside a few of us on Saturday.

Come think with us. Leave with the journal in your hands.

This Saturday. 2 - 5pm. The Land School (@rebuild_foundation). RSVP at the link in bio. by @ccam_chicago

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