Interactive poster wall
Turn static poster work into a browser or projected piece that reacts to motion, sound, touch, or time.
For artists, designers, makers & storytellers
Art does not sit beside computing. It shapes what computing becomes.
PFW ACM is a place to build interactive work with people who can help make it move, react, simulate, render, connect, and ship. You don't need to be a CS major..
ordered dither / realtime lightmove anywhere across this opening to aim the light
common ground
Computing can be a medium, a tool, or canvas.
Bring the part you already care about—illustration, typography, motion, 3D, sound, photography, storytelling, installation, interface design, fabrication—and use computing as another material.
You bring composition, image-making, motion, sound, storytelling and taste. CS students bring systems, interactivity, tooling and implementation.
Both sides at the forefront.
The useful work happens when both disciplines shape the result from the beginning: what it should feel like, what it should do, and what is technically possible.
The useful work happens when both disciplines shape the result from the beginning: what it should feel like, what it should do, and what is technically possible.
collaboration map
Pick the kind of thing you already want to make.
You don't need to start with learning programming. Start with a medium or problem, then bring in the computing that makes it possible.
Selected collaboration
Game art & technical art
Art / design brings
Concept art, 2D/3D assets, animation, VFX direction, interface art, environments, visual identity.
CS brings
Engine integration, shaders, tools, procedural systems, performance, gameplay and asset pipelines.
Together: A playable scene, stylized effects system, animation tool, UI kit, level, or small game.
possible this semester
Small enough to start. Rich enough to become portfolio work.
These are collaboration proposals for possible student projects. A member can pitch one, recruit around it, or use it as a workshop theme.
Small narrative game
Pair illustration, writing, sound and programming around one tightly scoped interactive story.
Realtime VFX study
Build shaders, particles, dithered materials, stylized lighting, transitions and UI effects for a shared visual language.
Digital exhibition
Design a web-based or room-scale exhibit with unusual navigation, responsive media and accessibility built in.
Kinetic / light sculpture
Use sensors, motors, addressable lights or projected graphics as physical artistic material.
Experimental typography
Create type that bends, fragments, responds, sonifies, reflows or behaves as a realtime system.
Open creative tool
Build a plugin, brush engine, asset utility, pixel tool, color system or workflow helper around an artist-defined need.
Accessible redesign
Take an existing interface or exhibit and rethink its visual, motion, keyboard, contrast and screen-reader experience together.
Art provenance / anti-scraping lab
Study metadata, fingerprints, crawler behavior and adversarial defenses that help artists retain control of online work.
code as material
The page can be part of the work.
Creative computing does not have to mean a dashboard or a utilitarian app. The browser can behave like a print surface, a typographic system, an animation engine, an instrument, a game space or an installation controller.
Interactive surface
Marks, grain, motion, response.
Quantized marks and granular physics turn pointer input into visible material behavior. This is the browser used as a responsive surface rather than as a container for controls.
gridgrainphysicsinput
cellular automaton / granular physicsdrag to pour material
Text systems
Type can be image, data, and motion.
Letters can be sampled into geometry, scattered and reassembled, or treated as a small statistical system. Here the text itself becomes the structure being computed.
typesamplingprobabilityinteraction
glyph rasterization / particle reassemblymove to disturb / click to scatter
art
art
bigram Markov chain / next-word branchingchoose a branch to continue the phrase
a real shared deadline
One place this already happens: Global Game Jam
Our game jam is a short, practical example of cross-disciplinary work: teams need visual artists, designers, writers, musicians, organizers and programmers. It is useful because everyone has to make one thing together—not hand work across a departmental wall.
14 games completed at PFW GGJ 2026
defensive technology
One AI-adjacent area worth studying: protecting artists from it.
For artists, the useful AI-adjacent questions are defense, consent, provenance and control: keeping authorship legible and creative work harder to appropriate without permission.
Treat creative work like something worth engineering protections around: how it is attributed, copied, scraped, altered, archived and verified.
- Build provenance and metadata workflows that survive publishing and export.
- Explore perceptual hashing, watermarking and portfolio scrape monitoring.
- Study adversarial artist-protection research such as Glaze and Nightshade.
- Design artist-facing security tools around actual studio workflows instead of forcing artists into security software.
make something together
Bring an art problem. Bring a half-built idea. Bring a medium you want to make interactive.
Participation is optional and project-driven. You can come to one workshop, find a programmer for a piece, propose a collaboration, or spend a semester learning a new creative tool with other students.