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Stung Eye

The eye of the bee holder.

via: nevver

Sand dunes on Mars appear to flow and drip like a liquid.

Street

Vote for BabyLolly @ The Next Web

Hi pals. We need your votes for BabyLolly in the Rising Sun Startup Rally for this year’s The Next Web conference. Please lend us your support by clicking the “Vote Now” button.

With enough votes for our video we’ll be able to present at the conference later this month in Amsterdam.

Art and Code - Overview Part III

My Art and Code overview continues… (See: Part I & Part II)

Sunday Continued

The toolkit presentations continued after lunch.

Processing - Presented by co-creators Ben Fry and Casey Reas

I’ve written about Processing here before. It is still my goto tool for visual coding.

Jotted Down:

Fry, Reas, Shiffman, and Greenberg all in one room.

Should the concept of literacy be expanded to include programming fluency.

Max / MSP / Jitter - Presented by Luke Dubois

Max / MSP / Jitter is a graphical programming environment for music, audio and media. A patcher based languages that shares roots with Pd which was demoed in the morning.

Jotted Down:

I guess I’m a FLOSS snob; although this environment looks much more polished than Pd, I gave it less attention because it’s a commercial product. (There’s a 30-day trail version, but the full bundle costs $699 USD.)

Reminder to check out the work of Michael Joaquin Grey, especially Recapitulate: Retrace, Erase, Repeat which uses Goya’s The Disasters of War etchings as source fodder.

Also, check out Hello World, The Song (in Max/MSP)

VVVV - Presented by Sebastian Oschatz

Vvvv is a video-synthesis toolkit. The programming interface is similar to the patch-base language we’ve already seen (Pd and Max/MSP), graphical function-blocks connected with wires. For a more detailed look read Ctrl+B For Concurrency.

Of the visual languages presented at the conference, vvvv is the only one I downloaded and experimented with. Oh I do wish for infinite time to play with all these wonderful tools.

Jotted Down

Read the vvvv licensing page, commercial vs. non-commercial uses.

This language doesn’t contain any explicit looping structures.

Nerdy VJs would go wild for this.

And then we had a cookie break.

AIR & Extendscript - Present by Dr. WooHoo

A number of Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffects) contain an implementation of Javascript (called Extendscript) which can be used to programmatically control (and potentially abuse) these products.

Jotted Down

Reminder to check out In the Mod.

openFrameworks - Presented by Zachary Lieberman, Theodore Watson, Arturo Castro

openFrameworks is a C++ library for creative coding. It was described as a glue languages wrapping together several commonly-used open-source multimedia libraries. Minimal Design: There are very few classes, and inside of those classes, there are very few functions.

Jotted Down

Looks fast! Might lend itself nicely to augmented reality projects.

Evening - Dorkbot @ Brillobox

The Dorkbot Pecha Kucha at the Brillobox was fun. I presented early having greatly under-estimated the length of my presentation. The 10 minutes were over quickly, and I fear my last few minutes were a muddle.

Delicious beers were consumed. I chatted with some wonderful people.

Floating-Lightbulb of the night, bringing Jonathan Brodsky idea of coding competitions to RRC.

Monday - The Warp Up

Panel discussions, CODE and FORM at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, pizza and beers with some interesting folks, and then a cab ride to the airport and home again home.