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Participation at Creativity and Cognition 2026

· 3 min read
Juan Pablo Sáenz Moreno
Juan Pablo Sáenz Moreno
Assistant Professor

I will attend the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference (C&C '26), held from July 13-16, 2026, in London, United Kingdom, where I will present "Reframe: Rethinking Versioning as a Creative Practice in Coding", a paper co-authored with Stefano Di Leo.

The work introduces Reframe, a web-based Creative Coding environment for p5.js that explores how versioning can become part of the creative process itself, rather than being treated only as a technical mechanism for saving and recovering previous states.

Creative Coding practices are often highly exploratory: artists and designers develop code-based works through small edits, parameter tuning, visual inspection, and repeated experimentation. In this context, even minor changes in code or numerical values can lead to substantially different visual outcomes. However, many existing tools provide limited support for capturing, comparing, and revisiting the intermediate states that emerge during this process.

Reframe addresses this challenge by combining non-linear navigation, direct code editing, parameter-level exploration, and continuous visual feedback within a single workspace. The system distinguishes between Frames, which represent structural changes in a sketch, and Explorations, which capture value-level variations within a given direction. In doing so, Reframe supports divergence, reflection, and continued iteration while keeping source code at the center of creative practice.

Logo of the ACM Creativity and Cognition 2026 conference

Reframe: Rethinking Versioning as a Creative Practice in Coding​

Versioning is commonly understood as a way to store, recover, and compare previous states of a project. In Creative Coding, however, versioning can play a broader role. Prior versions are not only records of past work, but can also become points of departure for new directions, materials for reflection, and resources for continued exploration.

Reframe builds on this idea by rethinking versioning as a creative practice. Instead of organizing a sketch history as a single linear sequence of revisions, the system supports non-linear navigation across multiple creative directions. Structurally different states of a sketch are captured as Frames, while parameter-level variations within a frame are saved as Explorations.

This distinction allows creative coders to move between different stages of their process, compare visual outcomes, revisit previous decisions, and continue developing alternative directions without losing sight of the code that produced them. The interface brings together a visual history of the sketch, a code editor, a tuning console, and a live canvas, supporting a workflow in which code, history, and visual output remain tightly connected.

Screenshot of the Reframe Creative Coding environment

By keeping source code as the main creative medium while making the evolution of a sketch more visible and revisitable, Reframe contributes to ongoing research on Creativity Support Tools, interactive systems, and programming environments for artistic and exploratory coding.

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