November 15-20, 2010
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany

The purpose of the inter-media forum is to facilitate a cross-border exchange between interactive media, digital art and generative design. The ‘NODE – Forum for digital Arts’ emerged in 2008 from an initiative of developers and users of the programming language vvvv, which is mostly used to create artistic and creative software projects. But NODE is more than just a large-scale vvvv user meeting, the NODE – Forum for Digital Arts gathers people working across the disciplines of applied and artistic media in a week-long event.

The focus of this years NODE10 is the investigation of cultural consequences of a post-industrialised, technological society. The exhibition ‘abstrakt Abstrakt’ thus deepens the discourse surrounding technology and society. Participants look into the subjects through workshops and talks combined with subsequent symposiums and live performances.

NODE10 – Official site
NODE10 on Facebook
NODE10 on Twitter

Deadline: 31.08.2010

This year you are definitely invited to participate the NODE Forum for Digital Arts again. So don´t hesitate and send us your work, which could be from screen to wall to everything. Please send us your proposal including the following information:

- detailed contact information
- title of your work
- context of creation (personnal project, schoolwork, professional)
- description of your work
- duration, resolution, sizes, tech rider
- screenshots, photographs

only as pdf to: node@vvvv.org (subject: submission)

For all other materials please send your documents to:

NODE – Forum for Digital Arts
Niddastrasse 84hh, 60329 Frankfurt, Germany

My thanks to all the great people at Shakerag, and especially my studio assistant Greg Pond (an excellent sound artist and sculptor.) Between the awesome food, great company and inspiring conversations it was a week well spent down South.

The following are some useful links that came up in the course of the week, reposted here for convenience.

• Classes and objects:
  - Shiffman’s Processing tutorial about objects
  - Shiffman’s Particle Systems tutorial
  - How my Dog learned Polymorphism
  - Java Tutorial: Object-Oriented Programming Concepts
• Processing.org Tutorials section
• wiki.processing.org (tutorials, hacks, documentation)
• 3D geometry generation: Toroid
• Fabbing and 3D printing:
  - Meshlab 3D model viewer
  - unwrappingLib for polygon unwrapping
  - Unfold Fab project for 3D printing ceramics
  - Hemesh library for complex 3D meshes
• Book: Getting started with Processing

We also had some fun with Arduino that made me realize I really do need to pick up some more physical computing tools.

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.

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?]

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

• 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