Creative Coding & Custom AI Tools - Fall 2026 Career Workshop Series

Program Overview

This four-part series teaches you to use AI to create generative and interactive art. We’ll use netnet.studio, a custom open-source platform dedicated to reclaiming the web as a hand-crafted space for expression. While no prior coding experience is required, curiosity is essential and some familiarity is helpful.

This workshop isn't about letting AI write for you, but about leveraging it to accelerate your learning and expand your creative possibilities. We'll incorporate AI as part of an experimental practice, ensuring this tech serves your vision rather than subconsciously dictating it.

By the end, you will have built and published an interactive artwork that integrates AI both in its creation and as an integrated component of the work itself.

To apply, students should complete this form. 

Program Dates

Students must commit to attending all four workshops in-person in order to participate. 

• Wednesday, October 7 | 5:00 - 7:00 PM
• Wednesday, October 14 | 5:00 - 7:00 PM
• Wednesday, October 21 | 5:00 - 7:00 PM
• Wednesday, November 4 | 5:00 - 7:00 PM

Workshop 1:
Before Choosing to Use AI

Before we can thoughtfully integrate AI into creative work, we need a grounded understanding of the medium it is increasingly being asked to produce: the web. This workshop introduces the fundamentals of generative and interactive art in the browser, starting with the basic languages of the web (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and how they work together to structure, style, and animate an experience. We will cover how creative coding projects are organized through files and folders, and how to publish our work directly to the web. We will also introduce “version control” with Git and GitHub, a way to document and track changes to a project as it evolves through iteration and experimentation.

Workshop 2:
When Choosing to Use AI

Artificial "Intelligence" (AI) is surrounded by a lot of hype, and knowing when that hype is warranted requires an understanding of how it works. This first workshop lays the foundation for making informed decisions about when, how, and whether to use this technology in your work. We will explore how user interfaces shape AI adoption, how business models impact privacy and control, the role of training data in bias and intellectual property, and the tradeoffs between large and small models regarding efficiency, environmental costs and oversight. Our goal isn't to prescribe a universal rule, but to help you develop the judgment needed to weave AI into your creative coding practice in a way that aligns with your values and supports your growth, rather ceding creative control to an algorithm and losing the hands-crafted engagement that drives both learning and creative expression.

Workshop 3:

AI as Coding Assistants

It’s tempting, with coding assistants at hand, to “vibe-code” your way to something interesting. But your imagination is bounded by your understanding of the medium. If we turn to AI coding assistants too early and too often, our ideas become constrained by what a chatbot suggests, and while they're very proficient coders, they're not very creative thinkers. That said, AI assistance is becoming a fixture in the modern coding toolkit. This workshop surveys the latest LLMs for code generation and critique, helping you identify their limits and develop the prompting strategies needed to get the most value from these models while ensuring you remain the primary architect of your work.

Workshop 4:

AI as Creative Material
Moving beyond the chat interface, this workshop explores how to embed AI directly into your work to create generative and interactive experiences that were previously impossible. While large, cloud-based LLMs dominate the headlines, they are just one type of neural network architecture. We will examine how smaller, specialized models can now run locally in the browser, allowing you to package them directly with your code. By shifting from remote proprietary services to on-device processing, you gain significant advantages: reduced environmental costs, enhanced user privacy, and the ability to create self-contained experiences that don't rely on external servers.