The NODE crew from Frankfurt has announced the followup to their successful NODE08 festival. I will be co-curating the NODE10 exhibition with Eno Henze, a collaboration I think will have some interesting results.

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

I wrote a useful piece of code during the recent Shakerag workshop that makes it easy to save and load parameter data from text files. To celebrate the recent launch of the new Processing Wiki I have added it there, but for completeness I will also post it here.

Use Data.beginSave() to initialize data string collection, then add data with Data.add(). To write to file, use endSave(filename). I’ve included code for auto-incrementing filenames, it’s used in the example code.

To load data, call Data.load(filename), then use readInt(), readFloat(), readString() etc. to get values from the strings read from the text file. Used properly this should give you most of the flexibility you need for simple data saving.

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I just finished a very satisfying workshop at Shakerag in Sewanee, Tennesse. It was inspiring to spend a week writing code surrounded by craft makers doing everything from pottery and book binding to embroidery and twig geometries. It reminded me that no creative practice exists in a vacuum, but stands on the shoulders of the collective knowledge produced by all the makers that went before.

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.

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!

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.

Good news for Processing heads who use sound: Damien de Fede has released a new major version of his excellent Minim library. Along with bug fixes, new features include:

• added functions to FFT for doing forward transforms with an offset: forward(float[] samples, offset) and forward(AudioBuffer samples, offset)
• added a freqToIndex(float freq) method to FFT for finding out the index of the spectrum band that contains the passed in frequency.
• added a stop() method to AudioSample, so that playing samples can be immediately silenced.
• added setPanNoGlide(float pan) to Controller, which will snap the panning setting of a sound to the provided value.
• added setInputMixer(Mixer) and setOutputMixer(Mixer), which allow you to specify which Java Mixer object should be used when obtaining inputs (AudioInput) and outputs (AudioOuput, AudioPlayer, AudioSnippet, AudioSample).

Download from the Minim project page. Read more about the development process on the Compartmental blog.

I’ve uploaded some HD videos from the Stockspace series I did a while back. You can see the whole set on my Flickr: Stockspace set. There you can also see them in proper HD resolution, which helps preserve finer details of the geometry.

These were originally created for use as TV spots for Knight Capital Group. Most of the time they get aired on financial networks very early in the morning, since traders love preparing for the opening of the market by obsessively watching news.

They were also shown on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square once, on an occasion where the Knight CEO rang the morning bell to open the NY Stock Exchange that day. As a recent immigrant to New York that certainly felt gratifying.

Processing does not provide any direct mechanism for manipulating the look of the sketch Window, but Java natively supports tricks like turning off the window chrome, explicitly setting window position and making a window “float” over all other UI elements. All of this can be accessed via PApplet’s internal “frame” field, which holds an instance of a Frame object representing the window your sketch is running in. But even so, Java won’t let you have free reign without a little trickery.

The following hack demonstrates how to make a window that has no OS chrome, always stays on top of the UI and has an explicitly set screen position. You can even use the cursor keys to move the window around the screen.

Personally, what I like most about this hack is that it gets around Processing’s (or possibly Java’s) assumptions about a minimum window size of ~120×120. If you specify a size that’s less than 120 on one side, Processing will be pad that side with grey pixels to reach the minimum. But with this hack you can have tiny windows that you can micro-manage to your heart’s delight. I use it to make debug dispays, small control panels and other useful things.

Update: @CedricKiefer pointed out another Processing example that allows for transparent and even irregularly shaped windows. It’s Windows-only apparently, I bet this kind of thing is a major violation of Apple GUI laws anyhow.

Update 2: @ideoforms took my post literally and made a sketch with multiple bouncing windows. Nice.

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As documented in this thread on the Processing forums the TileSaver class seems to be broken for current versions of Processing. Sadly I’m not sure what the problem is and I don’t have time to fix it right now.

However, I tried the original TileSaver code posted back in 2006 and miraculously that still works. This would imply a larger issue with the unlekkerLib library and Processing 1.0, which I’ll have to address when I have the time.

For now, here is a link to a working Processing sketch using the old TileSaver code: TileSaverTest.zip

After several requests I’ve taken the time to make unlekkerLib compatible with Processing 1.0. Apologies to anyone who’s been inconvenienced by the lack of a 1.0 version.

In particular, STL export should work again. However I haven’t had the chance to test the code very much, so please let me know if you find any bugs.

• unlekkerLib0003c