Hydra Workshop

On June 23, 2019, I taught a workshop on Hydra at Babycastles, the legendary independent video game gallery and community space in Manhattan's West Village. This intimate Sunday afternoon session introduced participants to Olivia Jack's live-coding visual library, a tool that makes creating dynamic, responsive visuals accessible to anyone with an interest in creative coding, regardless of their programming background.

Hydra's elegance lies in its simplicity: it takes an input, modifies it through various transformations, and returns an output to the screen. Despite being built on JavaScript, Hydra requires minimal programming knowledge to get started, making it an ideal entry point for visual artists, musicians, and performers interested in incorporating live-coded visuals into their practice. This accessibility was central to the workshop's approach—participants could begin creating compelling visuals within minutes of opening the editor.

The workshop covered practical aspects of working with Hydra, from installation options—including the web browser editor for immediate experimentation, the Atom package for integrated development, or a local Node.js setup for advanced users—to core concepts like BPM control for music synchronization, mouse interaction for real-time manipulation, and time-based animation for evolving compositions. Through hands-on exercises, participants explored how mathematical operations and simple functions could generate surprisingly complex and beautiful visual patterns.

What makes Hydra particularly powerful for live performance is the immediate feedback loop between code and visual output. Every change to the code is reflected instantly on screen, allowing for improvisation and experimentation in ways that feel more like playing an instrument than traditional programming. Workshop participants experienced this firsthand, discovering how small modifications to parameters could dramatically transform the visual outcome and how combining simple operations could create intricate, layered compositions.

Babycastles provided the perfect venue for this exploration, with its commitment to experimental and accessible approaches to digital creativity. The space's welcoming atmosphere encouraged participants to experiment fearlessly, share their discoveries, and support each other's learning. By the end of the session, everyone had created their own visual sketches and gained access to documentation, code examples, and community resources to continue their Hydra journey beyond the workshop.