The ever-trusty del.icio.us/TomC feed brings news of a debate related to the Processing or Die thread a while back. A blog post over on Grand Text Auto about a lecture by C.E.B. Reas at the Human Systems | Digital Bodies conference has drawn some interesting comments about “procedural literacy” and discussion of general terminology.

Michael Mateas, associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, has posted a link to his paper "Procedural Literacy: Educating the New Media Practitioner" (PDF). In it he argues that a knowledge of computational processes (i.e. procedural literacy) is a requirement for anyone seriously intending to deal with the so-called “new media”. It’s slightly on the techy side of things, but has some interesting historical references (Papert, Kay, Nelson etc.) as well as some fresh takes on the basic problem of computing for the humanities. For instance, he proposes (writing) games as the perfect vehicle for understanding a procedural approach. Interestingly, another participant in the discussion, Ian Bogost, has a book out on MIT Press entitled Unit Operations : An Approach to Videogame Criticism.

The idea of computational literacy extends beyond what is traditionally considered code. Our favorite Norwegian blogger heroine, Jill Walker, forced her electronic literature students to learn HTML and CSS in order to set up their own blogs. While HTML lacks any active computational component, it can still potentially hold a transformative experience in terms of understanding how computers “think”. Just ask all the Myspace kids.

And of course there is always the dogmatic Open Source view as to why you should learn to code: If you can’t hack it, it will control your life.

OFFF Festival, EXTEND : Advanced Processing Workshop

Barcelona is always a nice place to be, but the upcoming second week in May may hold particular interest to creatives working with digital media. The reason is the OFFF festival for "Post-Digital Creation Culture". Now in its fifth year, OFFF has moved away from its Flash-oriented roots and embraced the full spectrum of experimental digital work. According to the festival site, OFFF is exploring “software aesthetics and new languages for interactive and visual expression.”

The festival’s biggest pull is probably the presentations by a core of well-known creatives, with names like Kyle Cooper, Weworkforthem, Nando Costa and many more. This year the list is also conspicuously full of names from the computational design and generative art fields: Ben Fry, Golan Levin, Casey Reas, Marcos Weskamp, Zach Lieberman etc. It’s an interesting mix, and while the actual program of events hasn’t been announced yet there are sure to be some good presentations.

A special partner event of OFFF is the EXTEND: Advanced Processing Workshop. Co-produced by OFFF and Hangar (an art centre for the audiovisual arts), the one-week EXTEND workshop will be led by Ben Fry, Casey Reaz, Zachary Lieberman and Marius Watz. The workshop is intended for artists and designers who already know how to code, but who would like to experiment with new topics, learn how to extend the Processing tool itself or just play around in a constructive environment.

The workshop fee is set at a low EUR 50, so it should be accessible to freelancers without design agencies who can bankroll them. The number of places are limited, however. To be accepted, applicants must submit a personal biography and a description of previous experience with Processing.

Application deadline is 21 April. See the following call for more information.

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With its rich content and well-implemented tagging system, del.icio.us provides a tantalizing data set for would-be information visualizers. Fortunately, the open del.icio.us API allows developers full access to the functionality of the system.

To support the recently launched Processing hacks site I have written up a quick tutorial on how to access del.icio.us with Processing. The hack uses David Czarnecki’s delicious-java library. I also added a simple hack for outputting PostScript vector files.

Processinghacks.com

This site went live while Generator.x was having a holiday, but it deserves a repost even though it’s a few weeks old:

The ever-productive gentlemen Tom Carden and Karsten Schmidt (Toxi) have launched Processinghacks, a user-contributed Wiki intended to provide the Processing community with documentation of advanced techniques.

Processinghacks nicely fills the gap left by the lack of tutorials on the Processing site, combined with the beginner focus of the built-in examples. While a lot of answers are available on the forums, they are sometimes out of date or hard to find. Processinghacks provides details on specialized techniques that are beyond the scope of the core Processing project, such as integrating Processing with Java or hacking the source code itself.

A big plus is that this effort is completely independent of Ben and Casey, which means that they can focus their energies on the core project of bringing Processing to version 1.0. For those who remember the debate brought up by Karsten a little while ago, this should set an example. Instead of just complaining about the state of things, people like Tom and Karsten are actively providing a service to the community.

Some highlights from Processinghacks:

• Loading GPS data in the GPX format
• The definitive Processing in Eclipse tutorial
• Writing text on curves

Toxi aka Karsten Schmidt has been playing productive troublemaker the last few days, blogging some loose thoughts about what kind of tools and ideas are needed for a productive evolution of the computational design field. To roughly summarize: He is critical of the current state of the generative / computational scene, and the tools that are being hyped. Among his criticisms is that the work that is currently popular in the scene is often focused on immediate gratification, duplicating already existing work. It also often found lacking in niceties like software design, or even a more general understanding of good coding practices.

Karsten used Processing as the basis of his statements, pointing out that the procedural syntax of Processing could educate lazy coders and ultimately a dead-end for serious users of the tool. Not surprisingly, this has caused an explosive (but not incendiary) discussion over on the Processing forums. Ultimately, the discussion deals with the theoretical foundation for a tool like Processing, but also with possible future directions for the project. It’s on the techy side, but relevant for anyone who fancies her/himself a coder or who wants to understand what makes a programming language/tool capable of maximum freedom of expression.

Be sure to also read Karsten's followup where he clarifies his position after some misunderstandings.

cchoge: Lorenz Roller Coaster

Normally anything to do with fractals or strange attractors is practically taboo, due to obvious abuse in the early 90s. But this Roller Coaster variation of the Lorenz attractor (posted by CodeTree user cchoge) is sweet in its simplicity.

The viewpoint follows the path of the attractor, so that the viewer gets a truly spatial appreciation of the system. Source code is available, of course.

Hudson-Powell & Co: Responsive Type

Responsive Type sketch

Going with the recent typographic focus: Responsive Type is a computational typography study. The user types text in an applet, which renders the shapes and strokes of the type in realtime, allowing animation and modular typography. Created in Processing, the applet currently only has one typographic style. Work is underway to open up the source and allow users to add more styles.

Responsive Type was created by London-based Hudson-Powell for their exhibition at Beamst, Tokyo. Messages typed in the online applet are shown live in the gallery. The project is a collaboration with a team including Processing regulars v3ga and Michael Chang, see also the project credits.

Hudson-Powell is brothers Jody and Luke, who take a conceptual approach to design and illustration. For their September 2005 cover design for SHIFT they set up a web cam in their studio for a month. They then used various objects (strings, toy bricks etc) to spell out the letters SHIFT, changing them frequently. SHIFT also has an interview with Hudson-Powell online.

Via v3ga.

Coder community: CodeTree

Rich Hauck: Flying X

Rich Hauck has just launched CodeTree, a new and ambitious project that, if successful, could become a gathering point for coders, artists and designers. CodeTree is a community-based depository where users upload pieces created in Flash and Processing for others to look at. If they like the work, they can download the source code and learn from it. Taking some cues from Flickr and del.icio.us, CodeTree lets registered users tag works as well as rate them.

From the about page:

CodeTree is still in Beta, read the announcement blog entry for more details. To be successful, it will probably need more ways to include information about the works. The focus as it stands is on visual sketches only, for which it should do a far better job than the user-submitted section of Processing.org exhibition page. But code that solves particular problems will be more useful in the long run, whether they are simple hacks or actual libraries. It’ll be interesting to see how CodeTree develops.

Rich Hauck is a student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU. Link via REAS on the Processing.org forums.

Robert Hodgin: Spirals

Robert Hodgin of Flight404 is celebrating the launch of Processing BETA 0098 and it’s newly included “export as application” feature. This allows non-Processing users to enjoy works that use features like OpenGL and video input, which would have been impossible to show in applet form.

Robert’s contribution (possibly one of the first Processing apps available for public consumption) is Spirals, a webcam-based 3D system of whirling shapes. If you liked his previous work with live visuals done in Processing, you’re bound to like this.

Seth Hunter has posted a short tutorial on how to integrate Processing and Supercollider, using Open Sound Control to send messages back and forth. This means that even if you can’t afford a Lemur controller, you can at least build yourself a spiffy experimental interface in Processing. Seth’s tutorial uses oscP5, an OSC library by Andreas Schlegel.

Caveat: Supercollider is free, but is primarily for MacOS. There is a Windows port of Supercollider, but I’m not sure how stable this is. See also: SourceForge page for Supercollider.