CSS Drawing Bootcamp Residency
New Media Art Club proudly presents Paint by Style Sheet, an exhibition featuring works created during their 4th artist bootcamp residency. This intensive, two-day residency brought together artists to explore the creative potential of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as a medium for drawing.
Held on April 1st and 2nd, 2025, the residency provided structured workshops and collaborative projects led by Ben Evans, a seasoned practitioner in creative coding and digital art.
Participants received mentorship, technical guidance, and access to resources, creating a dynamic environment for experimentation. With no prior knowledge of CSS required, artists embraced the challenge of transforming web design principles into visual art forms.
Abbie Canning
Abbie Canning is an artist, curator and creative producer whose studio is based at Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth, Derbyshire.
Abbie’s conceptual practice is driven by queries and investigations, resulting in an eclectic output. Encompassing installation, sculpture, photography, text and video, her work frequently presents inconclusive narratives or relational challenges about art, culture, the verbal and visual semiotics of contemporary society and the mundanity of the everyday. Often her work simultaneously draws attention to fault lines between communication and interpretation, between the object and its given context, and the artist and their audience - upending the established stability of the viewer's relationship to art.
"Board" is the outcome of a two day bootcamp residency working in CSS coding, supported by designer Ben Evans and New Media Art Club. Throughout the duration of the residency Abbie sought to explore the relationship between her sculptural studio practice and her socially engaged practice which is underpinned by creative digital technologies.
Board is an attempt to bridge these two disparate strands of Abbie’s practice, alongside being a visual depiction of her increasing frustration at the laborious nature of CSS coding.
"Being and Nothingness (After Sartre)" is the outcome of the above detailed two day bootcamp residency as was Abbie's first attempt at producing an artwork through CSS coding. Increasingly, Abbie began giving consideration to the part that creative digital technologies play in our everyday lives and the increasing role of AI. What gives our lives significance, Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, is not pre-established for us by God or nature but is something for which we ourselves are responsible. Being and Nothingness plays on the ideas behind Sartre's seminal text whilst exploring the use of CSS coding as a tool for visual output.
David John Scarborough
David John Scarborough is a British-Australian artist, musician and curator based in Charnwood, East Midlands, UK. His practice follows the desire lines between digital technology, ecology, and place, drawing from autobiography, heritage and natural history. He creates immersive environments that integrate multidimensional narratives, visuals, and sound to explore the knotty relationships between language and land. From video games set in underground forests to visual albums crafted from samples and stock footage, each project is a distinct world that responds to contemporary themes and experiences.
Untitled (The Cartographers) is an experimental video-work combining a screen recording of CSS coding, a scripted conversation, vocal and midi recordings and a virtual woodland. The video work uses CSS code as a real and imagined navigation tool to think through how we might locate our selves across and within webspace, landscapes and our own histories. The design of the video-work has been made with collaborators, musician Claire Lleshi and designer Ben Evans. It features excerpts from the author Robert Macfarlane.
Untitled (The Cartographers) is part of the development for And The Forest Housed The Song, an online multiplayer woodland world launching in 2025. It offers an emotive experience in and through virtual landscapes carefully assembled from animations, music and dioramas through geo-fiction, song-craft and collaborative processes.
Fania Raczinski
Fania is a lecturer, researcher, and artist.
She has a long-standing interest in the Blaue Reiter group of Expressionist artists, especially Franz Marc (1880-1916) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and this piece is a continuation in a series of artworks that create digitally animated interpretations of Blaue Reiter originals.
Her previous focus was SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) but for this exhibition she specialised in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to create the drawing and animation and a little bit of JavaScript to include a camera for basic motion triggers. There are 86 different individual components on the screen that make up the image - on 9 different layers!
Our Residents were:
