Jer Thorp: NY Times: 365/360

Processing visualization head Jer Thorp is putting his money where his mouth and publishing 7 pieces of code in 7 days, free to download and experiment with. Judging from the three that he’s released so far they’re not your standard 20-minute sketches either:

1. GoodMorning! is a Twitter vizualization, showing users around the world popping up on a globe as they utter the magic words “good morning”. With a little geocoding and spherical mapping thrown in, this is a sweet sketch
2. NY Times: 365/360 uses the New York Times open data API to retrieve news stories for an entire year and draw connections between them. The results combine complexity with elegance for that true infoporn look.
3. tree.growth revisits that old classic, the L-system tree. Thorp uses colors and abstract “leaves” to great effect.

With such a strong start, one certainly looks forward to seeing the next four sketches to come. It’s not so common to find sketches of this complexity freely available, so they’re a great study for users who are on the threshold of making more complex applications.

Create an interactive type experience. Experiment with animated and interactive approaches to typography, applying computational strategies for animation.Tell a story or make the user create their own story.

Work in groups. Make the result printable. The challenge is to make a static object become alive, transform and move over time. Key goal: Engage – interact – surprise.

Examples: Typographic animation, text scrollers, dynamic letters, emotional typography, automatic layouts, type as pattern, randomized fonts.
Deadline: Presentation Thursday 27.11.

• Thinking with type
• Type + Code
• Teaching Type
• I Love Typography
• Typographyserved

• Peter Cho: Typotopo
• Peter Cho: Thesis
• Hudson-Powell: Responsive Type
• Lego Font Creator
• Michael Schmidt: Genotyp
• Vítor Quelhas: Dyntypo
• Ricardo Marxer: Caligraft
• Nicolai, a modular font

Lukas Vojir: Processing Monsters

Czech Processing hacker Lukas Vojir has come up with a great project to test out your coding skills: Make your very own Processing Monster!

Essentially, these “monsters” are little black and white interactive sketches, in which all manners of strange dark creatures stand ready to react to the user’s poking and prodding. It’s surprisingly effective in its simplicity, once again reminding you that simple narrative devices are often the best.

Lukas is currently soliciting collaborators who want to contribute to the online bestiary, if you have a minute I would definitely recommend giving it a go. Now, if only I had the time to make that scary multi-tentacled squid beast…

For more about Lukas Vojir, take a look at his portfolio site rmx.cz or his Tumblr blog.

A new online storage contender: Dropbox

Digital nomads and data paranoiacs everywhere tend to be big fans of online storage, and I am no exception. I’ve been using Box.net to share large files with clients and colleagues for a long time. It’s a great service with a nice GUI, with good support for sharing files. Their service record is excellent, I’ve never had any with service outages or trouble uploading.

However, the storage limit on the basic Box.net plan is only 5 GB for $7.95 / month. They offer an upgraded plan with 15 GB, but I’m not prepared to pay $19.95 every month for a few gigabytes. I’d be happy to pay up to $10 / month, but in return I want enough storage that I can use it without worrying about running out of space. 50 gigs or more would be sufficient for that purpose.

Shopping around, I’ve found JungleDisk to be a great solution for genuine online backup. It’s based on Amazon AWS storage, and users are charged according to actual storage used. I currently store 14 gigabytes, which last month cost me a measly $3.56 for last month including transfer fees. Compared with the one-off $20 purchase of the software, this is a very reasonable option.

JungleDisk uses a desktop application for its operations, so it’s well integrated in the native file system and supports automated backup tasks. I have it set up to safeguard key folders like current projects, office documents etc. I can also access files interactively through a cached network drive, which allows me to download old projects and large media files even while travelling.

Dropbox is a new storage service that has only just come out of beta, and it looks very promising so far. It combines a dynamic web interface with a desktop application, providing the best of both worlds. The software sets up a sync’ed folder on your computer, so that editing folder structures and uploading files is as easy as copying files around your file system. Files uploaded through the web interface will be downloaded and sync’ed with the local folder.

The web interface allows you to set up file sharing with other Dropbox members. So far a few features are missing that would make it easy to share files with non-members. There is a public folder that you can use to provide public URLs to specific files, but it still lacks the important feature of sharing public folders.

According to a recent blog post Dropbox plans to offer 2 GB for free and 50 GB for $9.99 / month, or $99.99 / year. Sounds like just the right deal for my purposes. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. But even if I end up switching from Box.net I’ll probably keep JungleDisk for backing up larger projects.

I just got an email from Casey saying that processinghacks.com has finally officially been integrated into the main Processing web site. The new URL is http://processing.org/hacks/. Processinghacks was a great initiative by Toxi and Tom Carden, but has ended up in an inactive limbo over the years. Wikis are perfect for letting users contribute their own content, but they also requires a dedicated community to work properly. Sadly, that never quite happened.

Hopefully, the integration into processing.org will provide a little extra motivation for would-be contributors to step up to the plate. There are already links to empty pages indicating topics that should be filled, giving some useful starting points. I know there are some things in unlekkerLib that would fit, but I’ll have to see when I have the time to write them up.

In any case, congratulations to the Processing team for adding a new feature, and thanks to Toxi and Tom Carden for having the Processing hacks idea in the first place…

Book: Ira Greenberg - Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

Ira Greenberg’s "Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art" (published by Friends of Ed) was the first Processing book to hit the shelves this fall. I haven’t had a chance to look at it in Person, but from the sample chapters provided it looks very useful.

“Appendix C: Integrating Processing within Java” should be of interest to anyone looking to better understand how Processing and Java work together. It breaks down the basics of how pure Java syntax differs from Processing, and shows how you can make the switch quite easily. It wraps up with a useful example of how to write a Swing GUI application with a Processing sketch as a GUI Component.

The two other sample chapters deal respectively with 3D rendering (including a quick introduction to vector math) and drawing more complex shapes. You can download all of them from the Friends of Ed site, where you can also buy the book in hardcopy or ebook form.

[via Processing forums: Two windows in pure java?]

Jana Frank has posted a really great video on YouTube of the final presentation of the Merz Akademie Pathwaywoche workshop. Thank you, Jana! The projects included print output from generative systems, sound-reactive visuals and particle systems. See my Flickr set for more pictures of the presentation.

Be sure to check out Jana's illustrations, as well as her video of her own workshop.

Various artists and resources:

• Generator.x blog
• Processingblogs
• Visualcomplexity
• C.E.B. Reas: Process series
• Lia: Various works
• Turux.at
• Martin Wattenberg: Shape of Song etc.
• Robert Hodgins: Flight404

Flickr groups etc.

• Group: Processing
• Group: Generator.x
• Group: Digital fabrication
• Insect54: Design references
• Toxi: Labours of love
• FFFFound.com: General visual pornography
• FFFFound.com: My found

Non-digital artists

• Bridget Riley
• Victor Vasarely
• Esther Stocker

I just found this gem while looking at my YouTube subscriptions: Karsten Schmidt (aka Toxi) and Matt Wade from Moving Brands were interviewed for the launch of the Japanese book "Built with Processing". They speak a little about their general approach and then about a few specific projects.

The presentation of the KEF Muon project is perhaps the most compelling of the three included. But for long-time Processing heads the bonus of seeing the mythical Toxi in the flesh should be enough to warrant a few minutes of your time.

Spiegel Online has just published a feature on generative art: Kunst aus dem Computer: Malen nach Zahlen (in German). It features work by myself, Neil Banas (who was blogged on Generator.x a while back) and San Base.

The opening paragraph strangely proclaims that “Marius Watz is always afraid.” (Marius Watz hat ständig Angst.) That seems to be a slighthly overenthusiastic interpretation of a comment I made about the importance of backup and having access to data while travelling. It also states that I’ve exhibited in Los Angeles, which I haven’t.

The rest of the article seems ok, if a tad superficial. In particular, I think the issue of whether or not generative art can be sold is a bit more resolved than it comes across in the article. The answer is yes, of course it can. The main challenges here are reaching collectors and museums, as well as to make sure the work is collected in a form that can be maintained for posterity.

See the following two articles at Artinfo for some pointers on the subject of selling and collecting media art:

• Code in a Box
• Conserving Pixels, Bits, and Bytes

Thanks to Christina Vassallo for providing me with these links in the first place.