• Seminar: Programmation avancée avec OpenFrameworks
• Location: l’Atelier Hypermédia, l’École Supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Dates: October 13-17, 2008
• Time: 9h-12h / 14h-18h

As I mentioned last week, starting tomorrow I will be teaching a week-long intensive introduction to OpenFrameworks and C++ programming for artists and creative types. If you’re motivated and want to join in, let me know. Unfortunately, my blog has been down all week and I only figured out how to fix it today (Sunday), so this call for stragglers will probably be too late. But if you’re already in the south of France, we still have some room for what I called last week « des piques-assiette ». Just come with a laptop and we’ll set you up with 220V, wifi and ‘da knowledge.

As in last week, classes are en français, and we can’t make any travel accomodations. Also, this is an advanced class, so I’m going to figure that you’re already knowlegable in classes and lists. If you want to prepare, you should basically know how to program classes/objects in Processing/Java but you do not need to know C++ already. I’ll set you up with that. You should also understand how 3D works, pushMatrix() and popMatrix(), although I will of course go over all these concepts on Monday. (Si vous vous sentez perdu, vous trouverez une brève introduction sur ces concepts dans mes cours sur Processing). I’ve also started a class on using OpenFrameworks but I’m only at the introduction for now.

This is a fireworks application (UQÀM project) 100% made with processing language (http://www.processing.org).
Source: http://ignivome.com/processing/fireworks/

Author: ignivomeflame
Keywords: ignivome processing fireworks java animation interactivity uqam
Added: October 11, 2008

This is Toroko “old” and “new”.

This is sweet and interesting to look at. The Cave Story will be ported to the Wii and the characters will be slightly powered up. As you can see on the picture, the number of pixel doubled, in order to enhance the detail level. The sweet thing is, that according to Infendo you will have the option to play the new, or the original pixelset of the characters at the Wii version of Cave Story. Thumbs up again for Nintendo. Get all details at the Nicalis-blog.

Generally spoken: Doubling the number of pixels is a very interesting technique to design sprites and characters I think. Even to use it systematically. Start with a white square.

Finally exquisite news again, where people from Cologne (and Vienna I think) were really involved in. The RJDJ is an iPhone application, that will turn your life into an interactive musicvideo. It plays music, that will be modified by sensory input. In other words you have music, that reacts to sensory and environmental input. It makes use of different sensors, like the microphone, the acceleration sensor and the touchpad. RJDJ turns your mobile phone into a very complex mixture of music playing device, music instrument or reality shaping artifact. The creators say about it, that it is “like glasses for your ears”. They are right. Not only for them the RJDJ is a “digital drug”.

The application therefore does not “play music”, but reacts to “scenes”. That’s why they call the patches for the app “scenes”. You can write your own stuff with the help of Pure Data.

Get your trip and all other information at the RJDJ-Website. There is a introduction and also a site for downloading scenes.

See how to play and jam with it:

An openFrameworks workgroup has started this week at Hangar. Every thursday until March, the wise Arturo will be there helping you with any doubt that you have. From 19 to 21 pm. +info

The equally talented Chris Sugrue will be doing the same in Madrid’s Medialab. Every friday from 19 to 21pm. +info

Last, and this has been going on for some months now, the incombustible Alba Corral has created an increasingly active spanish speaking processing community, with forum, wiki and more cool projects on the way.

tags:barcelona hangar madrid medialab openframeworks processing.org visualp5 barcelona, hangar, madrid, medialab, openframeworks, processing.org, visualp5 ]]> http://www.jesusgollonet.com/blog/2008/10/11/meanwhile/feed/ http://youtube.com/?v=wcFgAgVKGQ8 http://youtube.com/?v=wcFgAgVKGQ8#comments Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:20:45 +0000 mflux http://youtube.com/?v=wcFgAgVKGQ8

This is a personal demo reel of Michael “Flux” Chang featuring works with various clients including:

+ Motion Theory
+ Protohaus
+ Yahoo! Design Innovation Team

Works shown are produced with Processing
http://www.processing.org

Michael’s Blog/Site:
http://www.ghost-hack.com

Author: mflux
Keywords: procedural animation nike interface interaction design simulation processing zoomable motion theory visualization
Added: October 9, 2008

At Post Spectacular I found the link to an interesting work of computer generated art. Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter edited a huge fake book. The pdf-file consist of 3785 pages full of poems, that were made by computer, but credits are given to real poem authors. I don’t know if ever a real book was made, but imagine… over 3700 (or 1850) pages! What a big pile of paper.

The computer generated poems itself look good. They feel somehow natural - like poems. I can’t say anything about the artistic quality itself, because I am really not into the art of poems and never was. But the fact that 3700 poems, from authors I never heard of, just come into one book, would really make me suspicious. The cover of the book is labeled “Issue1″. So are the guys planning another one?

You can download the book here, or directly as pdf.

Made with Processing. Read more at:
http://blog.omine.net/2008/10/08/i-am-david-sparkle-jaded-afghan/

http://www.myspace.com/iamdavidsparkle
http://www.myspace.com/kittywurecords

Author: eduardoomine
Keywords: iamdavidsparkle beatdetection processing processing.org music fft opengl jogl postrock alternative electronic generative
Added: October 9, 2008

Another prototype to demonstrate the use of gesture recognition as interaction device to navigate a 3 dimensional building.

Author: dbisinteractive
Keywords: Gesture Recognition Interaction Design Processing.org Flash
Added: October 8, 2008

A new prototype to demonstrate the use of gesture recognition as an interaction mechanism.

Author: dbisinteractive
Keywords: Gesture Recognition Interaction Design Processing.org Flash
Added: October 8, 2008

Meat Boy is great independent game. You play a “juicy piece of meat”, that has save a girl in each level. The story and the gameplay feels really oldschool, and in fact it is. What makes the game so great is not only the gameplay, but foremost the blissful graphic and the excellent leveldesign, that is really in the neigbourhood of oldschool-arcade games from the 8- and 16-bit era.

You can play Meat Boy online, or download the package on your windows-machine. The games was made by Edmund McMillen and Jonathan McEntee. Plus: there is also a leveleditor on board. Happy sharing.

View larger image on my Flickr page.

Those that know me know I am a sucker for multitudes. Many of anything intrigues me more than single things ever could. So it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to find out that I took 2925 dice and formed them into a bitmap image of the Madonna. Thats the Madonna, and not just plain ol’ Madonna.

For those interested in the process, it is quite simple.

Step 1: Get drunk on martinis and buy a shit-load of dice from Amazon.
Step 2: Wait one week. Arrival!
Step 3: Think of an image you don’t mind spending several hours immortalizing.
Step 4: Size the image and make it 6-color grey scale.

Step 5: Select each of the colors, from darkest to brightest, and recolor the pixels to something more contrasty (I used ROY-G-BIV for mine).

Step 6: Depending on the size of the image, you will want to make a system for dealing with small sections at a time. I chose to do 5×5 squares.

Step 7: Make sure you keep track of which parts of the image you have done already because trying to go back in and find where you left off can be tricky.
Step 8: Photograph and post results on Flickr and blog so you can show dozens of strangers just how little you have to do on a Saturday night.
Step 9: Rest.

I’ve been working on finishing up the book’s web site www.learningprocessing.com. I’ve added some new tutorials, fixed up some of the examples, and slowly but surely am getting more exercise answers online.

In addition, there have been some nice write-ups about the book online, most recently a very fair and accurate review that outlines some of the book’s strengths and weaknesses by Douglas Edric Stanley.

My Big Screens class did their first tests on the IAC video wall last week. Show coming on December 12.

Big Screens Class from shiffman on Vimeo

Discovered a few bugs in the most pixels ever library which can hopefully be squashed this week.

I just received Daniel Shiffman’s book Learning Processing, A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. It’s great, and absolutely (finally!) a book I can recommend wholeheartedly for people wanting to learn how to program in Processing. As its’ name suggests, it’s a beginner’s book — so if you’re already clear about most of the basics you might want to try one of the other two books, although there are some excellent advanced chapters on integrating Java, using video and sound, as well as grabbing data off of the Internets.

I was one of the early-draft readers of this book, and was immediately struck by its tone: Daniel is obviously a teacher and clearly has some experience teaching programming to people who normally wouldn’t be inclined to program: creative types. The book starts right off with getting to work inside the environment and keeping it simple. I also think that Casey Reas‘ book is very good in this respect, as opposed to Ira Greenberg’s book which takes a little while before getting started. Now, there are some dangers to this approach, and Shiffman’s book also feels a bit too much like you’re following a fairly standard linear trade course: learn A, then B, then C, … That’s okay because the goal is to teach you everything-you-need-to-know and to keep you on track. But while it starts off quickly and gets right into the heart of things on page 1, it can get a little dull after a while because of that same linear structure. It is not as devoted as Greenberg’s book, for example, on exploring the visual possibilities of the software, although there is — of course — some of that. Also, the design of the book is a little ugly — Daniel, your book has the design of a “Java Programming” manual!. This is compared to Reas’ book which has a nice encyclopedic feel to it (it should be clear by now that I like horizontal texts) and allows for some jumping around. So this is really a classroom book, if anything, or at least reads like one, for a standard american-style course on Interaction Design.

There is one little detail that I absolutely love, and insisted he keep in the book despite some hestiation, precisely because it’s so unabashedly dopey: Zoog, Daniel’s Processing equivalent for the infamous “Hello World!”.

Zoog is totally lame, and totally cool. I love Zoog. I want a t-shirt.

I would definitely recommend it for a question I am asked quite often: teachers often write to me and ask what book they should read in order to prepare for a class on programming. If you’re teaching Processing, this is a good one to read from A-Z. If you know everything in there, as well as in the online supplements (I even think these should have been included in the book, cf. Learning Processing Tutorials), you pretty much have all the answers your students will undoubtedly throw at you in class. Again, this is obviously written by someone who has some classroom experience making real-world interactive installations and prototypes.

For my part, I’m still waiting for that crazy off the wall book of a totally different ilk made for what I think is Processing’s strength: its compactness and simplicity. So I guess I’ll just have to write that one myself (more on that later). Also, we really need an Arduino book now. Making Things Talk by Tom Igoe is great, but is not as good of a learn-the-basics book as any of the three main Processing books which are all three of them excellent for getting you started.

Image from Rob Chiu’s fantastic FOTB trailer. So fuckin awesome that my name was attacked by seagulls.

Another conference come and gone. And what a conference it was. Easily the most memorable and probably the most enjoyable of all the conferences I have had attended.

Firstly, many thanks to John Davey for exceeding my expectations once again. He is a gracious host and a good friend and I look forward to the future events that he helms. Well done.

Secondly, to Karim Rashid and Andy Thrasyvoulou, please tone it down a bit. They are the two designers of myhotel Brighton which is where the speakers were housed. Don’t get me wrong. As far as hotels go, it was decent but there were some silly and downright horrible design decisions that made it a miss. Especially with the bathroom. For some reason, there was no mirror above the sink, which was located in a curved space. The mirrors were to either side of the sink so you needed to push up against the sink and turn to the side to even see yourself. But most annoyingly, the mirror’s placement afforded me unexpected and unrequested views of my growing bald-spot. That isn’t what you want in a bathroom vanity. You want luxury and utility, but mostly, you want it to make you feel attractive. This room gave you a sneak attack view of a really unfortunate angle. Damn you Karim and Andy. Damn you both.

Thirdly, thanks to all that attended my talk. You were a really responsive audience and for that I am grateful. There seems to be some disconnect between American audiences and those abroad. I find that with my talks in America, the audience tends to wait until the end before applauding. But the Brits were very happy to applaud every time they experienced something they liked. This made the act of speaking to a large group much easier and much more comfortable. Probably didn’t hurt that most of them had a beer in hand because I was the final ‘Inspiration Session’ which occurred late in the day.

Fourthly, to the speakers, it is always a treat to spend time with you. It is odd to feel so close to people that I only see maybe once or twice a year, and sometimes much more infrequently than that. The last time I saw James Paterson and Andries Odendaal was maybe about five years ago but we picked back up like it had only been a couple months.

You are very much the reason I agree to speak at these Flash-centric conferences. It is a pleasure to spend time with you and I am consistently impressed by the quality of work that you showcase during your sessions.

Visualization of the YaCy development using the Processing-based software “Code Swarm”

The YaCy development started in 2004, but code was inserted into a SVN repository after more than a one-year development in 2005. The movie shows contributing developers and changes using an animation that was created with information from the YaCy SVN.

References:

Visualization: Code Swarm
vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/

Graphics Development Environment: Processing
processing.org/

Music: Younnat - ronin on air
younnat.com/

YaCy SVN:
svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/yacy/trunk

YaCy project:
yacy.net

Cast: Michael Christen

• Seminar: Introduction à la programmation avec Processing
• Location: l’Atelier Hypermédia, l’École Supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Dates: October 6-10, 2008
• Time: 9h-12h / 14h-18h

Starting monday of next week I will be shifting gears a bit and concentrating an entire week to getting the students up to speed on Processing with all the basics they will need to know in order work in the Atelier Hypermédia throughout the rest of the year. This basics class will be followed by an advanced class the following week on OpenFrameworks. If you’re motivated and want to join in, let me know.

The difference this year is that we are returning to a formula we had somewhat abandoned at the school concerning technical introductions: cram all the basics into one intense week, hence freeing up the rest of the year for workshops, experimentation, research, theoretical exploration and individual projects. We used to run the school following this formula in the good-old-days®™ and it was a blast. I hope we can find some of that fun, anarchic energy this time around.

This also allows students from outside of the school and general idlers, hangers-on, or what we here in France call “pique-assiettes” to follow the training as well, since they can usually spare a week or two from their home institutions. We had originally planned to have quite a few students and even professionals (designers, artists, whatever) participating this year — I so didn’t place out a call out of fear that too many would come, as in the past — but so far only a few have made themselves heard. There is no waiting list, but I do appreciate getting an email beforehand letting me know if and why you attend to crash the party. There are no fees or requirements for loafers, but we do ask you to bring a laptop.

Classes are in French, oui, tout sera en français, and we can’t make any travel accomodations at this late date. Sorry. If you want to prepare, there are some on-line classes on Processing that you can follow here: Processing - cours en-ligne.

Interactive installation.

details:
(Japanese)
pcf.axisdesign.org/

Cast: Yusuke Okamura

The Space Invaders project is one of the most enthusiastic streetart projects worldwide. It is around since years, leaving signs in almost all metropolitan areas in the world so far. The latest work was from this mysterious guy was made at the museumsquartier in Vienna. The invaders there are really impressive, how I can tell from the pictures. If you’ve been there… take some pictures, upload them and post them into the comments if you like. Check out the official pictures.