I’ll be teaching another workshop on creative coding at the end of the month! Join us, and learn to use Processing to create your own interactive, digital art. Details at gaffta.org.
Feeds
471 items (450 unread) in 9 feeds
Scott (10 unread)
-
Posted: February 10th, 2010, 6:08pm PST by Scott
-
Posted: February 10th, 2010, 5:27pm PST by Scott
Practice, my MFA thesis project, will be set up for you to explore this Friday in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Practice is both a work of interactive video art and a design research project.
Unlike most other works of this medium, it does not reward bodily motion and exaggerated gestures, but encourages patience and self-reflection. In so doing, it explores the tension between emotional engagement and the uncomfortable ambiguity of not knowing what will happen next.
Friday, February 12
About 9:00 – 11:00pm
16th St. and Guerrero St., NE corner (Map)
In the event of rain, the piece will be installed the next night, Saturday, 2/13.
-
Posted: January 27th, 2010, 1:32am PST by Scott
-
Posted: January 25th, 2010, 1:13pm PST by Scott
While working on deep ocean graphics for a client, I inadvertently created something more cloud-like.
-
Posted: January 21st, 2010, 5:54pm PST by Scott
It’s up! Check out the home page, now re-envisioned as an interactive portfolio of recent projects. Let me know what you think via the new “contact” link.
-
Posted: November 17th, 2009, 12:32pm PST by Scott
LAIKA is a new, dynamic typeface, designed and constructed by Nicolas Kunz and Michael Flückiger. The genius here is that visual elements of the face (such as weight, serif prominence, and italic degree) are reframed as parameters, into which can be fed values from any source — either your own keyboard, or something more interesting like weight or distance sensors, so the visual typographic form can respond to physical factors in an installation environment. Try it out!
-
Posted: November 4th, 2009, 10:50am PST by Scott
Remember when AOL leaked 650,000 of its users’ search queries? For the first time, we got to see what real people search for on the web.
Now, thanks to Search Suggestion technology by Google, Yahoo, and others, you don’t have to wait for a corporate screw-up to expose search queries — you can do it yourself! Just type a few letters, and watch the most popular searches appear on top.
-
Posted: October 9th, 2009, 5:45pm PDT by Scott
Camille Utterback gave a talk at UC Berkeley on Monday. A digital artist, pioneer of interactive video art, and one of last month’s awardees of a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. “genius grant”), Camille got her start in digital art at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. There, with Romy Achituv, she created her first interactive video installation, “Text Rain,” in 1999.
Utterback’s talk was titled “Luscious Complexity: Transcending the Doohickey.” I want to share some of her thoughts here, because many of them are right in line with my own recent thinking. The following items are highly paraphrased from my notes during the talk.
Utterback writes all of her own code, mostly in C++, but also uses Processing to sketch ideas.
In computational media, the rules are implicit and hidden. When the user has to deduce the rules, the interaction may be frustrating. When not frustrating, though, this quality can make for a beautiful process of discovery.
Always avoid “one liners.” Make sure your work has enough conceptual complexity to stand the test of time.
Consider how an installation affects your physical body — are you looking up? down? arching your back? bending toward the floor? Notice what emotions and behaviors we associate with those positions. (Eyes cast downward, for example, indicates shame. Looking straight ahead indicates engagement.) Don’t make the user uncomfortable, unless you are trying to make the user uncomfortable.
It is very important to do user testing. When coding, you are writing rules that define the accepted parameters of user behavior. Not everyone will behave as you do, so test to make sure your rules are flexible enough to work for others.
Using camera input automatically makes a piece social. People will move in front of the camera with others, interact with each other and the piece, and create their own meanings from the interaction.
People intuitively understand how to move and interact with mirrored video, by virtue of experience in the physical world (i.e. using mirrors). Think about how to translate other shared physical experiences into intuitive, digital interface mechanisms.
Utterback tries to bridge the gap between the “fleshy world” of the body and the rules-based world of the computer.
Her work in drawing systems (such as the piece Untitled #5) contains many hand-drawn elements, overlaid with digital manipulations. (Not all the forms are code-generated.)
This kind of work is fun, because people move in goofy ways, like kids.
-
Posted: October 7th, 2009, 8:26pm PDT by Scott
It’s done! This weekend’s creating coding workshop at GAFFTA went really well, despite Loveparade’s pounding revelry just outside. In case you missed it, you can experience all 10.5 hours of coding bliss in under two minutes — just watch the video below. Also, check out some of the great projects that the students made.
My souvenir Gray Area logo pin:
-
Posted: September 2nd, 2009, 2:49pm PDT by Scott
-->This browser does not have a Java Plug-in.
-->
Get the latest Java Plug-in here.I’m very excited to announce that I will be co-teaching a two-day introduction to Processing at the new Gray Area Foundation for the Arts here in San Francisco! The workshop is the first in a series on creative coding, and coincides with Gray Area’s grand opening celebrations and initial exhibition, featuring work by C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback, and Stamen Design.
The Gray Area folks have created an amazing space downtown, and this workshop is an exciting chance to learn a ton of great new skills, and even meet one of Processing’s co-initiators. (C.E.B. will be making an appearance.)
The workshop is scheduled for Saturday, October 3rd & Sunday, October 4th, 1:00 – 6:00pm both days.
See GAFFTA’s site for the complete schedule, details, and registration.
