As already mentioned here, Jeff Guess and I are working on synchronizing our two ateliers, his Atelier Pratiques Algorithmiques at the École d’Arts Cergy and my Atelier Hypermédia at the École d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence. I’ve just included Jeff’s class on Strings (en français, oui), into our own, so for all my students, this is required reading.

Eventually we’ll be creating a whole new entity that will group together all of Jeff’s classes as well as others. But we’ll have to figure out the feed mashup system and how all that ties into the various examples, tutorials, student work, and documentation on not only Processing, but as well all the other environments we teach (Flash, Pure Data, OpenFrameworks, etc).

This time next week Peter and I will be in Perth, Western Australia, basking in the geekly radiance of ByteMe festival and enjoying the hospitality of the inimitable Kat and Jasper, a.k.a. CDMo favourites VJZoo.

We don’t have any official panels or workshops planned. Instead we’ll be devoting our time to documenting the goings-on and creative outputs of all the other cool people who are attending the festival.

Aside from catching up with the ArtificialEyes crew and Australian Visualist extrordinaire Jean Poole, this festival will be especially exciting for CDM as it’s the first time Peter and I get to meet In Real Life! Will we still get along after our fleshy casings have shared a continent? Will the CDM empire crumble as we discover that we’re not really interested in writing about CreatingDigitalThings? Watch this space to find out.

After the festival concludes on the 9th of December Peter will accompany me back to Brisbane for CDM Summit ‘07, where we’ll discuss the future of CDM, work on CreatingDigitalStuff, and probably play quite a lot of Strikers.

Leisure time aside, we don’t really have anything concrete organized, so if any CDM readers will be in Brisbane between 9-14th December and are interested in an informal get together, or would like to catch up at ByteMe festival, make with the comments.

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This is a brief experiment in sound-reactive Processing sketches, and the first Processing-based content I’ve made. The first sketch is a heavily altered version of the “Geometry” example included with Processing, and the second one is a reworking of Dave Bollinger’s “Portal” sketch. The music is my own, “semicoma” from the forthcoming Micronaut album “Callisto.”

Cast: Chris Randall

Okay, Leopard users — we’re interested to hear more video output results as people upgrade. We got some good news earlier this month in that MacBook Pros (with both NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards) now properly support analog video output running under Windows on Leopard’s Boot Camp. That’s nifty, of course. But what about non-Pro MacBooks? We’ve heard at least one reader report that says that sync problems still stop MacBook users from sending analog (S-Video / composite) video when booted into Windows via Base Camp. (It’s too bad, as I actually enjoy the MacBook dongle for its ability to output S-Video and composite outputs simultaneously.)

Wikipedia now makes reference to the problem, as well — minus a citation, so if anyone has a proper citation for this, we’d love to hear it:

There is partial support for Apple’s combined S-video and composite video adapter for TV-out. Some Macs with an ATI graphics chip are compatible as long as the system is booted with the cable in place, yet many have had trouble getting the S-video image to sync properly from the Boot Camp side while using the 2007 aluminum iMacs, regardless of how the ATI resolution and refresh rate is set.

Anyone have test results?

Wondering why you’d want to run Windows on a Mac? How about the ability to play with Windows-only Flash development tools (yay, Flashdevelop), vvvv, Java 6, Microsoft’s XNA gaming framework, and Resolume? See 28 comments of ideas from our last post (and MacBook Pro users can have at these already):

What Are Your Favorite Windows-Only Visualist Tools?

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Quartz Composer gurus have had to face challenges bringing in network data: the problem is, to keep Quartz Compositions secure, Apple has largely crippled networking features. Celso Martinho has been hacking QC to make networking work in Leopard, and has a functional solution. He wrote us to tip us off on a detailed post at his blog.

First, if you’re still on Tiger, good news:

I needed a way to get data from the Network in the form of events that I could reuse in a quartz composition. So our resident mac programmer coded this custom made patch based on sparse non official documentation found on the internet. And it worked great. We have about 5 plasma screens with mac minis over at work running it for months, no problems whatsoever.

But while Leopard finally offered an official means of making your own patches (that’s what the rest of the patching world calls “objects”, Max/MSP, vvvv, and Pd users), Leopard also breaks their custom patch. Solution?

Then I found 2 patches in the new “Network” category: Network Broadcaster and Network Receiver. They are meant to connect several qtz compositions across the network and exchange messages between them. But maybe I can use them for something else…

I wrote a quartz composition to broadcast messages using UDP and multicast and started debugging and I discovered that the packets are really simple non-crippled text messages, four bytes per character iso-latin encoded chunks.

If you’re doing heavy-duty networking, I’d still investigate other alternatives to make sure Quartz Composer is your best choice. Processing and Max/MSP/Jitter both make short work of UDP send/receive, thanks to Java’s natural abilities there, as do objects in vvvv, Pd, and the like. Even Flash has some data features, with a little work. On the other hand, QC has some natural tricks of its own, and for multi-machine setups, the combination of this hack with QC’s new multi-computer features is very sweet indeed.

Full details, plus a PHP script that does the dirty work, here:

Leopard’s Quartz Composer and Network events [Celso Martinho]

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I’ve just finished a fairly long introductory class on object-oriented programming in Processing. Yes, there are other classes in the oven that I’ll serve up when they’re ready. Here’s the link: Programmation orientée-objet, version sympathique. There is also source code for a silly little program called Bestioles that you can play with in your browser from the following address: Bestioles. This program is used at the end of the class and synthesizes quite a few concepts that are explored throughout the entire series of classes on Processing.

As usual, the text is in French, but you can always copy the many code examples and see what they do. I get many requests asking for translations of these classes. Unfortunately, I’m only paid to teach in French, and I don’t have the time anyway to write these classes, so it’s really just a question of what has become absolutely indispensable to our work within the Atelier.

I’ll come back to this question of object-oriented programming later, but it has become quite clear to me over the past year that you cannot reach any acceptable level in Processing if you do not teach object-oriented programming as a basis for most work. And although we’ve been using objects within the Atelier since day one, I noticed that too many students at the end of last year were still creating their projects with linear structures that were stifling their work. So this year we’ve moved into objects from the get-go, hence this on-line class which I hope to use as a starting point for a more robust exploration of code, as well as artwork using richer algorithms.

Audio by Hood (”You’re worth the whole world” on “Cold House”).

I think this one better illustrate the concept I was trying to explain in my last post. What I like here is that the sytem more clearly re-organise itself. Remind me a bit the universe just after the BigBang explosion.

Same concept as behind the previous experiment on sound reactive nodes.
The begining is graphicaly more interesting but if you look at this as one big thing it’s interesting to see how this system evolve. This one is really more stable than the previous one. I mean it go to one direction. Remind me a bit the universe bigbang! Where is planet earth?

Cast: Simon

Here’s a first experiment with the traer physics library
in Processing.

for more info in traer physics visit: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~traer/physics/

made with Processing
by tadklimp
tadklimp.wordpress.com

Cast: tadklimp

Software from Aaron Koblin added to the exhibition.

I have been using Processing for over four years. FOUR! Weird, right? Seems impossible that it has been that long. But a quick check of the old Processing forums showed that I signed up in May of 2003.

Things have changed quite a bit since I first started with what was then called P5 (btw, folk, the ‘P5′ nick has been deprecated). If my memory serves, version 60 was the one I started with. Now it is up to version 134 and is so tantalizingly close to being a 1.0 release. There are dozens of user contributed libraries, tons of reference material, and a quickly growing user base.

In the four years of my Processing experience, the question I am asked much more frequently than any other is “how do I get started with Processing”. The answer is simple enough. Practice! Like with any other new language or methodology, the more you use it, the more comfortable you become with it and the more control you gain over it.

I wish I had a better answer. Seems dismissive to say ‘practice makes perfect’, but I really don’t know how else to explain my process. Generally speaking, I try to code something that is right outside of my comfort zone. Oddly enough, these self-made tutorials are how most of my projects get started. Wanting to learn about ArrayLists led to my experiments with particle emitters. Wanting to learn about texture mapping led to my first experiments with OpenGL. Wanting to learn about arcballs led to my first experiments with Quaternions. Actually, that last one is a lie. I HATE Quaternions! I REFUSE to learn Quaternions!!! But not as much as Quaternions refuse to be learned by me. Damn things are confusing!

With the Magnetosphere project, it might help to know that I have been working with that code (and getting a ton of help from co-workers and friends) for around three years. It started simply enough. I just wanted to make particles react to each other using the laws of magnetism to define their behaviors. But I stuck with the code. I returned to it every time I learned a new trick or found better ways to do old tricks. And so the code evolved.

When I think about how it looked when I started and how it looks now, I can’t believe how far its come. It just reaffirms the notion that practice does make perfect. Not that magnetosphere is perfect in any respect. I still see tons I want to do with it and there are plenty of tangents off magneto that are waiting to be explored.

So to answer the question of how to get started with a more concrete answer:

• Spend some time with the examples that come with Processing. If any of those examples intrigue you, figure out why they work. And then use them as a base for further study.
• Poke around in the forums. Many of your questions have already been answered. Search the forums for the right (or better) way to do something that you cant quite figure out.
• Get either of the following Processing books. Both have enough variety of content to get the beginner up to speed and keep the advanced user engaged.

Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists

Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

Starting to code in an unfamiliar environment can be a bit overwhelming at first. But thats the beauty of Processing. Getting started is surprisingly easy. My only programming experience before starting with Processing was Actionscript 1.0. I found that taking a Flash project and translating it to Processing was a fairly easy task. Here is a little Processing.org list about how Processing and Actionscript handle things slightly differently.

So thats it for now. Hopefully this will help orient those who are new to Processing. And in closing, please remember those tired clichés that became such overused phrases for a reason: there is truth in those little nuggets.

Practice makes perfect.
Rome wasnt built in a day.
If at first you dont succeed, try, try again.
The longest journey begins with a single step.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Okay, maybe not that last one so much.

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Cast: Andrey Yazev

My first steps with arduino and processing

Cast: Andrey Yazev