Bringing Digital Art to the Masses at the Girls Who Code #CodeFair

TL;DR The Women Rise team takes part in Girls Who Code’s Code Fair in New York. We ran an NFT Art Studio over the course of three days, to introduce thousands of visitors to the concept of digital art.

I’m not going to lie - when the team here at Women Rise found out that we were going to be taking part in the Girls Who Code Fair, there may have been some screams of excitement… 

Girls Who Code Fair

Girls Who Code is an international nonprofit organisation working to close the gender gap in technology, and leading the movement to inspire, educate and equip students who identify as girls or non-binary with the computing skills needed to pursue 21st century opportunities. We have always loved what they do and their mission so aligns with ours at Women Rise so we knew it was going to be the start of an exciting partnership!

Girls Who Code Fair took place at the Altman Building in Chelsea, New York, from Friday 24th - Sunday 26th March. Developed to celebrate GWC's 10th anniversary, the fair was an immersive tech experience designed to invite the public to play, discover, code, and engage their imagination using technology’s most thrilling innovations. Stepping into the fair on Friday morning, I was made momentarily speechless by the beauty of the room and the obvious effort that had gone into making the whole place such an exciting space for visitors to explore. My speechlessness didn’t last long though - as soon as I met up with the Women Rise team (that I usually only see through a computer screen since we’re a global remote team) there were more squeals of excitement!

A queue formed at the door before the fair opened at 10am and we saw loads of school buses dropping students off. Knowing that teachers and support staff had actively chosen to bring their students on a trip and engage them in STEM was really heartwarming and showed what a difference a good teacher can have on a young person’s life. I spent a very short period of my life working in a school and it never fails to amaze me how much work and commitment the staff put into every single day. A big shout out to teachers and support staff please!!   ‍

Women Rise NFT Art Studio

Now, let’s talk about the Women Rise NFT Art Studio that was created in collaboration with Girls Who Code and Synchrony. How do you inform thousands of people of all ages about the process of creating an NFT project? Sure, we could have created a course, a lecture, or maybe handed out flyers. But instead we thought why not invite them to experience the process and show them how it feels to create their own NFT artwork. Our activation at Code Fair was made up of three parts. The first part was the Create and Collaborate activation which introduced visitors to digital art and showed that NFTs aren’t a scary, new-age technology - their foundation still lies in beautiful art. We wanted to show where an NFT starts and allow people to play around with various digital tools to create art. Essentially, you could make art that you might want to put onto the blockchain. 

The second part of the activation was a generator, demonstrating how we used code to create the Women Rise art collection. Leading on from the Create and Collaborate activation, this generator will display a range of assets that you can shuffle through and customise to create an NFT collection that you really resonate with. All the art that the generator creates will be created by you - the generator is just mixing the assets to create variations. The generator also displayed the code and metadata relating to the collection as well. Once you generated an artwork, you could display it on a big screen for everyone to see. We loved seeing people get excited about the process and learning about the behind the scenes of creating an NFT collection. Visitors were so proud of their creations – running up to the screen in excitement to show which ones they’d created and taking photos of their unique artworks. 

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The final part of our NFT Art Studio was the pin badge making, where visitors could take home their own little piece of Women Rise art as a souvenir to remember the experience! We had thousands of pins but by Sunday we had run out, as people couldn’t get enough. We saw SO many attendees proudly repping their WR pins on their denim jackets, sweatshirts, t-shirts and even backpacks. 

We were incredibly grateful to Girls Who Code for putting on the fair and our partners, Synchrony, who not only helped to bring the activation to life, but also supported across the weekend with many team members actively helping visitors, engaging in conversations and generally being great cheerleaders for women in tech!

The whole team were absolutely thrilled to see such a range of people at the fair, from the youngest toddlers to grandparents trying the activities alongside their grandchildren. Celebrating representation and showcasing it in art is key to us at Qissa and Women Rise, and it was great to see this mirrored in the enthusiasm of the visitors. One particular attendee was excited to see herself represented in the artwork, saying:

“Yes! They have a hijabi one too.”

We were honoured to meet so many people, particularly old friends from the Women Rise community. We’re in our 16th month of Women Rise now, which can easily feel like a decade in this fast-moving space, so we were delighted to see some community members coming out to support us in New York, who we met right at the beginning of our NFT journey at our first in-person event! We also met many lovely new faces! Seeing the curiosity and knowledge of the young attendees was so inspiring and we had so many fabulous conversations. We met families from Connecticut, volunteers from Ohio and school students who had travelled all the way from Chicago!! We also welcomed the leadership at the Pakistan consulate to support this Pakistani youth led initiative in Web3. We met Consul General Ayesha Ali and walked her through the Women Rise activation at the GWC Code Fair. She was so supportive of the work we are doing and it was a joy to connect with her. 

Over the course of the three days, Code Fair hosted over 3000 individuals and was covered in various publications, including Time Out New York. We are incredibly grateful to Girls Who Code for having us and to our wonderful partners Synchrony, for helping put together such an immersive and engaging experience. What a weekend!! 

Also at Code Fair

Women Rise was the only NFT company exhibited at the fair, but there were so many other amazing activations as well. I particularly loved the ‘Color Code Your Vibe’ area from Wells Fargo, where visitors could have their photo taken and their aura would be shown in a printed photo - such a cool idea! The Metaverse Disco (brought to life by Accenture) was also super fun, with VR headsets allowing attendees to enter a disco space where they could listen to Doja Cat while dancing with others from the Girls Who Code community. And obviously everyone loved the fortune cookies provided by Bank of America in their Encryption Mantra Cafe! The code inside the cookies could then be used to decipher a worksheet - like being a spy, but with snacks! Other activities included a giant screen in the main room which displayed works by digital first female artists and a gaming lounge for visitors to relax and play video games coded by real Girls Who Code alumni while trying out some of the newest gaming tech.

“At Girls Who Code, we want to do more than close the gender gap in tech. We also want marginalised groups to know that computer science can be a space where they belong – a space that can be creative, fun, and bold. CodeFair is our way of showing the world that anything is possible when we work to create a tech industry that reflects the diverse world we live in today.” - Dr. Tarika Barrett, CEO of Girls Who Code.