Week 1 Studio: First marks

The first studio — what to have working before you arrive, and the smallest possible instrument you'll build once you do

22 February 2027

Bring a laptop with the toolchain installed and nothing else. There is no brief to read in advance, because the first thing this course teaches is that a brief written in words is not the same as a brief you can feel through a pointer.

Before the studio#

Get the toolchain running and confirm the page loads. That’s the whole preparation — there’s no reading, because the point of this studio is that you arrive without a plan for what the instrument should do and leave with one.

In the studio#

You’ll build the smallest possible thing that counts as an instrument: a canvas, and a line that follows wherever the pointer goes. No brush width, no colour, no meaning — just the one continuous gesture that everything later in the semester complicates. Shitao’s own treatise on painting opens the same way, four centuries early: before technique, before style, there is the single stroke, and everything a hand does afterwards is a variation on it. This studio is that idea, in code, on a screen that talks back.

By the end, get it running well enough to hand your laptop to the person next to you and watch what they do with it that you didn’t expect.

Afterwards#

Keep the build. Next week’s studio starts by showing it to the room, and the one thing you’re least sure about is more useful to bring than the thing that’s working.