Runtime: April 16 - April 24
Opening: April 16, 1pm
IMA Foundation courses Creative Coding Lab and Communications Lab 3D are proud to share recent student projects developed over the first half of the Spring 2026 semester.
For the midterm project of Creative Coding Lab, students were tasked with creating a generative visual inspired by the concept of discovering and breeding a new form of life in a laboratory. Over the first half of the semester, students developed an understanding of how motion, shape, color, and interactivity can be used to craft evolving visual compositions using creative coding tools. Starting from a single unit or creature, students experimented with animation, mutation, and increasing complexity, incorporating randomness so that their creations never looked or moved exactly the same way twice. Students interpreted the character and story of their organisms, considering habitat, behavior, and biology, to inform every visual decision, from generative form and procedural motion to audience-reactive behaviors. In this show, students present their living creations alongside detailed scientific descriptions, connecting the visual work back to the narratives they discovered through their creative process.
For the midterm project of Communications Lab 3D (Media Design Lab 3D), students selected a piece of music to use as a the basis for a 3D sculpture. Over the first half of the semester students developed a sense of how color, form, light, texture, and space can be used to develop visual compositions using 3D modeling software. Students interpreted elements of their chosen song, from tone, timbre, rhythm, and tempo to lyrics, affect, and cultural context, to develop all the elements of their sculptures using polygonal modeling, parametric modeling, virtual lights, customized shaders, skyboxes, and virtual cameras. In this show, students rendered their sculptures to match a 12” record cover to connecting the artwork of their projects back to their chosen songs.
