• Conference: Virtual Artist Lecture Series
• Speakers: Peter Sinclair, Robb Drinkwater
• Locations: L’école supérieur d’art d’Aix-en-Provence, Chicago Art Institute
• Date: 31 March 2006
• Reference: FACE (French American Cultural Exchange), SAIC, Locus Sonus
• Photos: Marion Bonnefoy & Douglas Edric Stanley

Just a quick note to mention that, no, I have not dissapeared, it’s just that I’m working on two BIG PROJECTS®™ that you will hear more about at some other point. Yes, both have a lot to do with code. The real big project is of course a doctoral thesis, and that means as little of me gets around as possible. I’ll also post more soon about the two Processing libraries Stéphane Cousot and I are finishing up.

In the meantime, a quick reference the the exciting-event-of-the-day, i.e. a networked cross-conference between the Chicago School of the Art Institute and the Aix-en-Provence Art School. We already met the Chicago croud in Aix-en-Provence, France Cadet just got back from a trip over there, some of our students are currently visiting, and now we’re getting to work on the networked aspect from our respective huts. I’m also supposed to jump over the big lake, but I’m too busy right now, so they’ll have to settle for my pixeled mug.

So for today’s inaugural conference, my collegue Peter Sinclair discussed his work with Locus Sonus and quickly demonstrated the current streaming/sampling Pure Data patch they’re currently working on for Locus Sonus. On the Chicago end, Robb Drinkwater talked about Supercollider (love that website!), and showed us a Processing meets supercollider demo he prepared for Dorkbot

Since the Aix antenna set up shop in the Atelier Hypermedia, and since the other free translator was already talking, it was my turn to translate what was being said (oh, simultaneous? joy!).

I’m the next speaker on the list (gotta finish a research presentation for April 5th, so I was outta this round), probably on April 27th. But I’ll have to confirm that later when I have something solid. Peter Sinclair suggested that we multicast my conference with Quicktime Broadcaster, meaning that whoever wants to, will be able to listen in. I’ll be giving a brief overview of the history of the Atelier Hypermedia, how we got where we’re at, why we don’t know where we’re going, and why we try to make it look fun. If you don’t understand French, it might be one of the few occasions where you can see me speak. More on that later.

Ultimately, these crossed conferences will be followed by networked collaborative work between Aix-en-Provence and Chicago. For that, Ben Chang and I will probably be building a Hypertable in Chicago soon and see what they can do with it.

So I’m really a doo-doo head for not bothering to demonstrate this sooner. . . but you can now use my Vector3D class as a library. Of course, this isn’t nearly as sophisticated as what you might, say, be able to do with traer.physics, but since this class is used in virtually all of my Nature of Code examples, it’s not such a nice thing to have to keep adding it to each project over and over and over and over again. . .

As you may have noticed, things have been a bit quiet around the blog for the last little while. I assure you I haven't fallen into a deep hole of any kind - unless you are talking figuratively.

I am leaving next Wednesday for EuroGP2006, and I have a pile of things to get sorted on this side of the pond before I leave. It should be a good conference. I'll be blogging the hell out of it, so you'll all get the goods.

Tomorrow night is my presentation for SIGGRAPH Vancouver with Gary Staciuk, and I've been spending a bit of time cleaning up my presentation for that and adding some new goodies that we didn't see in Seattle.

Now online: tutorial on threads and making Processing libraries that invoke event methods in the parent applet. Can you find the most errors?

This is one of the ideas I was thinking of in the last few weeks. Expanding the natural ability of (digital) tools through onlinecollaboration. The scratchpad is a canvas, where people all around the globe can meet and draw on the same canvas. This really is fun, but unfortunatelly there is almost no communication. There are mostly people able to draw just besides people who can’t. They often imitate your drawings or just “paint all black”. I think this tool is a great study, but it would be interesting to do more research on the aspects on a) ensuring quality, b) open to everyone vs. closed systems and c) communication besides collaborators.
Thanks to Martin.

There are some excellent works showing more anonymous collaboration with others at the yugop-archive.
Thanks to Wenzel.

This is one of the ideas I was thinking of in the last few weeks. Expanding the natural ability of (digital) tools through onlinecollaboration. The scratchpad is a canvas, where people all around the globe can meet and draw on the same canvas. This really is fun, but unfortunatelly there is almost no communication. There are mostly people able to draw just besides people who can’t. They often imitate your drawings or just “paint all black”. I think this tool is a great study, but it would be interesting to do more research on the aspects on a) ensuring quality, b) open to everyone vs. closed systems and c) communication besides collaborators.
Thanks to Martin.

There are some excellent works showing more anonymous collaboration with others at the yugop-archive.
Thanks to Wenzel.

Update: Be sure, to also check vectorama.org

On Saturday, I gave a Processing workshop at the Hunter College Integrated Media Arts (IMA) MFA program, sponsored by the Colab program. It was rather insane to try to cover what I usually do in an entire semester over a period of 4 hours, nonetheless, I had a terrific amount of fun blabbing on and on and on and, at the very least, a nice set of examples (26 total!) emerged. It’s all here.

Some comments about the workshop also ended up on Grand Text Auto and on Vade.

I’ll be doing another session on April 29th. . .

I just got notice that my Flash 8 BitmapExporter class is currently being used in a real world assignment: on spamrecycling.com it allows users to save images created from the innards of creatively recycled spam emails. To try it yourself, all you have to do is to forward a spam mail you’ve received to spam@spamrecycling.com. Shortly after you will receive a reply email containing a link to your personal spam recycling tool which allows you to get artistic with the garbage mail. When you are satisfied with the outcome you can take a screenshot and have it sent to your email adress.

The task of the BitmapExporter in this project is to compress and send fullscreen images like this to the server - for more details how this works and why this is more difficult than it might appear check out my original posting and the comments there.

This year’s flashconference/fmx in Stuttgart is approaching fast - it’s taking place from May 3rd - 6th - and it has become something like a tradition that I’m speaking there. In my session I will be talking about my attempts to build a VJ tool with Flash and quite untraditional for a german conference I’ll be holding it in English. The lineup is great as always - I’m sure that retiree André Michelle will blow us away with some amazing Flash 8.5 3D stuff, Holger Eggert will surprise us with impressive sound and Director tricks. I’m looking forward to see Nina Paley’s Flash animation talents and I’m very anxious to see Gary Stasiuk’s two sessions. And there are many more great presenters - check them all out here.

And now for another tradition - well, maybe it’s a bit early to call it like that already - but as the headline says I’m in the lucky position to raffle two four-day tickets for the fmx, each worth 185 Euro. I will give them to two different people (so it’s not two tickets for one winner). In order to win, all you have to do is send an email to fmx2006@quasimondo.com and list your personal top 3 sessions of the flashconference. On Monday, April the 17th I will randomly draw the two winners.

Something like a disclaimer: The tickets will ony be valid for the two winners and cannot be sold or transfered. There is no compensation in money possible. The winner will only get the ticket, there is no accomodation or travel expenses included. Oh yes - and of course it would be fair towards the others if you only take part in this raffle if you are able to attend.

If this site were a generative system version of TRL, then you would most likely find Lindenmayer systems (aka L-Systems) in the top 10 countdown. So just as you are returning from your wild and raucous spring break celebration (with Shakira, Teddy Geiger and more!), here’s a first pass at an example. . .

View the applet and accompanying explanation from my a to z course.

Si estás en barcelona y te interesa la interactividad física, estás de suerte.

• la próxima semana habrá un taller gratuito de pure data + arduino orientado a interficies físicas en hangar. Más info
• Si, como yo, te perdiste el taller de arduino que se hizo a finales de Enero, Esdi organiza otro para junio. En este caso contarán con la presencia de David Cuartielles y Massimo Banzi. Me han pasado un pdf con la información.
• También organizan para la primera semana de julio uno de diseño interactivo con electrónica low-tech, de título Social Robots. Será impartido por Roger Ibars (la imagen de arriba es de un cacharro suyo que además está en venta en ebay). Otro pdf con toda la información.

Siempre que el trabajo me lo permita… nos vemos allí.

Processing (BETA) 110, 111 released

well, Saturday (Sat 1st April) is the start of a mini exhibition of mine and a few other peoples.

The show is in the Victoria Baths in Manchester (which is a fabulous place, that should be visited before its restoration anyway!).

Its on Saturday 5-8pm
Sunday 12-4pm
Then Mon-Thur 5-8pm

To be honest I dont know all that much about the other artists work, but this website ( Interval )should be updated soon with more info.

What of mine is going to be there? Well, what I reckon will be the final incantation of unrealArt, which I have decided to call “A little Unreal”.
Its the same idea as the original UnrealArt except the installation will not show Unreal Tournament (the game) being played, you’ll simply hear it (quietly). The main focus will be the slow but steady portraits draw from the gameplay.

As I dont intend to continue on with the UnrealArt project after this, Im thinking of making all my UnrealArt prints available to buy online, just for a print onto semi-gloss paper, as lots of people seem to want a copy. So hopefully that system will be up and running after the show.

p.s. this last picture is to remind you that the pictures dont come out ready made… the very slowly reveal themselves.