In March of 2019, Ari Melenciano became the first COSA Contributor in Residence. She spent a week working with the resources and equipment of the Emergent Digital Practices Program to develop a series of tutorials related to culture, audio, and creative coding. Her tuorials are freely available on youtube and aim to bring new ideas and voices to the field of art and technology.

"This residency is focused on making open source creative technologies more accessible to people of different racial, cultural, gender, and socio-economic backgrounds."..."It's a representational project. In technology it's hard to find people who may look like you if you're Black or Latino/a, so visuals of people in different communities show all kinds of people can do programming."

Ari Melenciano is an artist and educator, an ITP Fellow and the founder of Afrotectopia. Her research lies at the intersections of experimental pedagogy, digital activism, aesthetics, speculative design, human-computer interactive technology, race/identity, and how technology impacts marginalized communities.

As part of her residency, Ari wrote this Guide to Creative Technology and produced tutorial videos including this one about Creating an AudioVisual Keyboard: