I always seem to forget how busy I’m usually becoming at the beginning of each new year. There does seem to be a pattern emerging or maybe it has to do with a combination of long winter nights and my lack of new years resolutions (okay, I’ve got a single one: need new website!) which keep other people busy with other things in January. Am currently engaged in various really exciting (albeit commercial) projects again and so any noticeable developments on the Sunflow P5 library front had to be delayed before I feel more comfortable to release it publicly. The important stuff works already (i.e. exporting triangles), however camera support, shaders and lighting still are an incomplete mess… There’s also a separate command line tool I’ve written to batch renderer frame sequences. Working on this stuff in my spare time also makes it really quite hard to realistically predict when things become ready. Someday I’ll learn not to do that anymore…

Speaking of Sunflow though, Christopher has released a new version (0.07.1) of the renderer and the website has been overhauled too. There’s also talk about changing the scene file format and Stephen Williams of Fluidforms is interested in writing/collaborating on a generic (RenderMan format based) external renderer for Processing. All great stuff on the horizon!

Speaking of more maintenance, Florian Jennett has kindly modded the Processing forums to export the most recent posts as RSS. This is great stuff, since my current feed of the same content (launched almost exactly 2 years ago) was semi-broken for quite a while now, ever since the forum’s HTML template changed last. I’ve tried to keep up with these changes initially, but had to succumb sometime last year. Unlike this old feed which was created via screen-scraping, the new one is coming straight out of the forum, so hopefully will not miss out posts or truncate them anymore…

Finally, my “digital self” is still fragmenting more & more since I’ve started contributing to Matt Pyke’s Everyoneforever group blog.

Tags: processing.org, rss, sunflow, everyoneforever, toxi

I have given up on allowing people to comment. 1 real comment per several hundred spam comments is just not a good enough ratio. Email me if you need to say something important.

robert at (domain)

“Oooh, me me me. I wanna try that!”

That was my response to Mike Creighton’s post about his experimentations with Quartz Composer. For those that don’t know, Quartz Composer is, and I quote, “a node based visual programming language provided as part of the Xcode development environment in Mac OS X v10.4 ‘Tiger’ for processing and rendering graphical data.”

Without getting too technical, I would describe it as MaxMSP/Jitter meets Bryce 3D. Okay, so why is it like Max? Because it is a “node based visual programming language” just like Max. You drag wires between various boxes and eventually you create something that runs. No biggie, right?

Well, if you are like me, that is a huge biggie. I want to see my code as lines of text, not as a jumble of tangled cords.

In all fairness, this is before I discovered the node-draggy equivalent of a for-loop, but still, it can get out of hand really quickly. Not to mention that I spend about half the time moving the boxes around to get a nice composition. I am detail driven so I want all the boxes to be equally spaced and aligned.

I say QC is like Bryce 3D because if any of you played with B3D before actually sitting down to learn a proper 3D application, you know just how easy it is to make something distractingly beautiful. I remember my first crystal sphere floating in a fractal-mountain lake like it was yesterday. It was easy to make, the reflections and refractions happened like magic, and I felt like I could make the next version of Myst all by myself.

QC is this way. Within minutes, I was able to make a kaleidoscope of live webcam input, apply it to a particle engine, throw in a textured rotating cube, and voila!

So I really dont know how to feel about it. Let me think about it for another week and I will get back to you.

Drive around office parks with a laptop, looking for unsecured wifi networks that have printers attached. Queue up a bunch of print jobs of this:

Step 3: Profit.

Whilst my folio interface continues to obey Hofstadter’s Law I’m dropping off a bunch of links. AStar has been updated to become Pathfinder. I am however getting some strangely slow results on a Linux machine test, either memory related or something else. Expect a fix, but not right now.

Fjen has taken appletobject.js and expanded upon it to build a pre-loader for Java applets (percentage and even loading bar). We need more examples of this technology in action, why not download the files and try it out. (P5 thread here.)

First Life (as opposed to second)
Sundance Film Festival online
Jeep Waterfall printer
Reno Balloon race Some amazing timelapse going on that offers some inspiration for a-life perhaps.
No pants (trousers) on the subway happening
Lego car factory (made from lego)
Armando Iannuci on the iPhone
Charlie the Unicorn
Desktop 3D fabricator
Silent Star Wars
DIY wrapping paper, thanks D. E. Stanley
Mark Knopfler at French & Saunders

Open source Flash MP3 player
PNGuin animated .pngs (JavaScript)
Javascript-Flash integration kit
Avoid PHP Page has expired warnings
Open source Flash for artists (article)

I’m just finishing up another trip to Savannah, GA. It’s Art & Technology Week here at the Telfair Museum. I participated in two programs, a workshop at the Moses Jackson Community Center and a demo for high school students at the Jepson Center. Haeyoung Kim (who performs under the name bubblyfish) also spoke. I really enjoyed learning about 8-bit music and am interesting in playing around with nanoloop. I hope to catch some of her performances in New York!

I also installed my new work, Garden. Oh geez, I just used Youtube again.

IBM’s Many Eyes is like Flickr for data visualizations. Hm. That phrase sounds familiar.

Many Eyes left a much better first impression on me than Swivel though. Here are Causes of Death, and US government expenses 1962-2004:

If you’re coming to this from somewhere else than Processingblogs, and you’re interested in code, then you might want to check out Jesús Gollonet’s recent post about openframeworks.

We’re very excited about this in the atelier. If you don’t know already:openframeworks is Zachary Lieberman’s project for an easy toolchain for artists wanting to work with C++. It’s not Processing, i.e. it won’t teach you how to code. But if you know Processing well, and/or you understand how to work with classes, this project should make your process of discovery a whole lot easier.

It took my collegues some time to realize this with Arduino : it isn’t the actual difficulty of the code itself that keeps many people away from these technologies, it’s (gasp!) the actual difficultly of plugging all the crap together correctly and turning it on. Difficulty and obscurantism are two very different things, and people tend to forget this. Nobody complains about a word processor not being able to write a really difficult thesis for them (to give just one example ;-), but they do complain if that word processor actually gets in the way of writing it. In the same vein, writing code can be difficult, everyone knows that — but why the hell should I have to write code while balancing on one foot and whistling Dixie?

Just a few months ago, some students expressed the desire to move up (or down, in fact) to C++ development for more speed and a deeper reach into the machine. One student is actually in the process of making the shift right now. In fact, Processing became a reality for us just at the moment when I was starting to build a toolchain very similar to what Lieberman et Cie have come up with. And I too was worried about how to make the whole process simple enough for students with programming experience but no formal training in computer science. Unfortunately, as only a cursory glance at this blog would show, I’m still trying to tie up a lot of loose ends, and this project never came to fruition. I only had time to make a few short examples of developing in C with OpenGL on Mac/PC/Linux, and even those remained unfinished. So this is a project I definitely want to get involved with, as many hands are always better than two when it comes to building platforms.

Probably more interesting than the actual libraries themselves (their open nature, etc.), is the prospect of having an artistic community working around a single set of API’s. Even if this community is small, it’s still significant. This is really the key. Starting around the time of Mac OS X Beta, I began experimenting with Cocoa/Objective-C, for example, until I realized that there weren’t m/any artists out there working with it, making it an irresponsible choice for teaching young artists. You don’t want to teach students some obscure technology that doesn’t have a footprint with other artists/students. Of course this might have been okay for computer science students, but it wasn’t a good choice for ours, especially given then fact that at the time less than half of the students used Macs (although that number is now around 75% if I count just those working with me). So I refuse to teach some technology that won’t work (for free) on everyone’s machines. That is one of the reasons I’ve totally ignored Quarz Composer and vvvv, even if they are both pretty cool.

We will absolutely jump all over this as soon as it becomes a reality. If not me directly, definitely some of my students.

Wie schon in den letzten Jahren, wird Marius Watz auch diesmal wieder bei der Club Transmediale dabei sein. Zum einen ist heute Abend Gast bei Liquid Space.05 im Ballhaus in Naunynstrasse 27. Los geht’s um 20:00 und kosten tut’s nix.

Vom 30. Januar bis zum 1. Februar gibt’s dann jedem Abend Visuals in der Maria.

So sah es 2006 aus:

Last week I went to a two-day openframeworks workshop run by Zach Lieberman at hangar.

As said here before (and elsewhere), openframeworks is an open-source library to help other artists and students produce works through coding, written in C++. Yes, this might sound familiar. Its philosophy and intentions are very similar to processing’s.

However, openframeworks is not an IDE, but a set of coherent wrappers around useful libraries. As zach puts it, it is more of a glue that puts together different pieces:

• OpenGL for graphics displaying,
• FreeImage for image manipulation,
• Freetype for font displaying and manipulation,
• rtAudio for audio.
• Quicktime (mac or pc), directShow (pc) and (soon) Video4Linux (linux) for video grabbing and playing

Some of the key concepts behind openframeworks:

• Its focus is to simplify things. The main intention is that “you don’t have to look at much code when you’re beginning” (which is far from easy in c++).
• It’s conformed of reusable pieces, not stitched together. You can use any of its parts independently.
• It pretends to give you direct access to data e.g: pixels of the image, low level audio

I’ve been using it for the last couple of months. I had never done anything with c++ nor I had any idea of where to start and openframeworks has definitely made the learning curve way smoother. Having been around for ages, c++ has lots of picky details to worry about (pointers vs variables, preprocessor, different compilers, uncompatible IDEs….) so having some sort of blueprint which shares some of the programming concepts with processing makes you feel a little more like at home.

Although it’s been used extensively to give workshops and classes, it’s in super-alpha state (even the installation process was being tested on our workshop). Zach is working with Theo Watson on a really-soon-to-publish release. Most of the stuff will work on win, mac and linux.

So stay tuned.

tags:c++ creative code hangar openframeworks workshop zach lieberman c++, creative code, hangar, openframeworks, workshop, zach lieberman

Video of installing new “Garden” project at Jepson Center for the Arts

Author: shiffman

Keywords: processing.org

Added: January 22, 2007

New software from Brad Borevitz added to the exhibition.