# Mouse Input & Events

**Track:** Foundations — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Beginner
**Prerequisites:** Conditionals

**In one line:** Turn the viewer into live input — follow the cursor, react to clicks.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Input is the moment the work stops performing for the viewer and begins responding to them. Reading the cursor's position and its clicks turns a one-way image into a feedback loop, a lineage running through Ivan Sutherland's 1963 "Sketchpad," the first program drawn on directly with a light pen, and Myron Krueger's "Videoplace," which made the whole body an instrument. Muriel Cooper's work at the MIT Media Lab pressed the same question: an interface is not a surface but a conversation. Aesthetically, interactivity reframes authorship — the artist composes a behavior, a space of possible responses, and the viewer completes each instance through their own movement.