tag: Processing

For the AlgoMech 2019 festival in June I created a new performative drawing piece, A Perfect Circle. The piece is about how we interface with computers that analyse our activities. It consists of a video and accompanying plotter drawings.

Making A Perfect Circle presented me with a few challenges. The make the video element I hacked together a couple of Processing scripts that did basic motion tracking by following a user-specified colour. It would draw these lines, creating new lines (instead of adding to an existing line) at each major turn and giving them a unique colour.

For OSP’s Print Party on October 18th I made a bunch of new software and modified some old software that did sonification of text, bitmap, and vector images. I saw it as a way to differently engage with the usually static images featured throughout the festival. Here’s some of the visual output from a Processing sketch that, when combined with Pure Data, would redraw an SVG and convert it to sound:

Comics Sans Must Die ended some time during the week of GLI.TC/H 2112. Although it only lasted just over a month long, the creation of Comic Sans Must Die actually started in July 2010 when I stumbled across the Geomerative library for Processing as a way to manipulate SVG files. After a bit of fiddling with one of the example files I was able to take (almost) any SVG file and gradually reduce it over time.

Love it or hate it, Comic Sans is one of the most popular fonts in the world.

Vincent Connare designed the font for Microsoft in 1995. He described it is best being used for “new computer users and families with children”. Despite this it has constantly been misused and can be seen everywhere from school letters, e-mails from government officials and even in documents about the discovery of the Higgs Boson.

Planning any sort of meeting? Don’t leave it to common sense to decide on the most appropriate time, use this random date generator instead!

Originally built for a.a.s, you can download a copy for yourself. Once loaded press Enter to stop on a date. The date is generated in the format dd/MM/yy/hh/mm/ss. You’ll need Processing and the Commodore 64 font (convert it using Processing), though you can use any font if you want.

Last Saturday I went down to London to attend OpenLab 5:

Openlab are providing a day of workshops & presentations about opensource software, and performances in the evening at Cafe OTO, Dalston. There is a venerable lineup of OpenLab members providing some in depth knowledge during the day and some great performances at night.

The workshops I were looking forward to most were the ones that involved Pure:Data and Processing. I’ve messed around with both of those programs before but I’ve only ever just edited the example files. That is until after some of the workshops: That was a snippet of work by Daniel Jones. It combined Supercollider and Processing and a camera to convert images into sound, which is something I’ve wanted to accomplish for a long time.

I need to get more done on my vjing work. So far I’ve done very little of it, and even less djing. I’ve been messing around with Pure Data, Xaos and Processing in an attempt to get some live processed images, and I’m now taking a peek at Ben Neal’s Phlumx software, but what I wonder is if I need to go look at more professional software…

Here’s a sample of what I’ve done. It was for a project at university to create a video about ‘Speed’ (created in Adobe Premier).