I will be teaching a one-week Processing Foundation workshop at Shakerag in Tennessee June 13-19. It should be a great excuse to visit Tennessee in the bloom of early summer and fraternize with other artists. See the registration page for details.
The workshop will give an introduction to Processing for artists, and focus on ways of integrating Processing into the participants’ art practice. The course description is as follows:
The rise of digital media tools for artists has led to an increasing understanding of software as a medium in its own right. Going beyond the confines of commercial software, artists are experimenting with code to create new forms of expression in areas like generative art, interactive installations, and information visualization.
This workshop will give an introduction to the idea of computational aesthetics, which understands form as a product of a computational process. We will use the popular Open Source tool Processing to start sketching with code, then move on to more advanced topics like video and vector output. Built on top of the Java language, Processing is simultaneously disarming in its simplicity and impressive in its ultimate potential. The last part of the week you will focus on individual work, during which we can look at how Processing can be applied to different forms of artistic practice.
The workshops take place on the campus of the St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School. Hope to see you there!
23:30 | April 20th, 2010 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
List of references for lecture about interactive art for AHO Interaction Design.
11:58 | April 20th, 2010 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
Ever since doing Stockspace project it seems I am getting asked to do data-related work. This despite the fact that my personal interests diverge from such masters of insightful infographics as Martin Wattenberg, David McCandless or Jonathan Harris.
Suffice to say that I am more concerned with exploring data structures as spaces than I am with providing new understandings of the information contained within them. Manuel Lima’s Information Visualization Manifesto calls for a seriousness on the topic of data treatments, while my projects remain comfortably frivolous.
Recently I’ve been working on a project that has required researching data sources and adapting them to illustrate a bigger idea, which has led to much Googling in the absence of good data from the client. Sometimes you find the right thing immediately, but sometimes data is hard to find in a format that is freely available and easily parsable. Since I have found some good sources I thought I’d share them here…
Miscellaneous free data
I would be interested in hearing tips about any great data sets out there, particularly interesting time series data.
Miska Knapek recently sent me a link to a source of weather sensor data from Helsinki, including measurements of wind direction at the top of Helsinki’s Olympic Tower in 5-minute intervals. He has already made some wind visualization videos and some fabricated wind data sculptures based on this data.
21:41 | April 11th, 2010 | marius watz | +del.icio.us | +digg | trackback
