Two of our Creative Technologists had the pleasure of attending onedotzero‘s “A Decade of Processing” film at BFI Southbank this past week, originally shown as part of onedotzero’s adventures in motion festival 2011. Here are their thoughts on Processing, and a short summary of the projectsthey enjoyed the most.
Originally created as a tool to teach the fundamentals of development with quick visual feedback, Processing has come a very long way in the last 10 years. Based on the Java language, it is now used and recognised a lot more professionally by artists and programmers for experimenting, prototyping and production. It is mainly known for its powerful graphics and openGL integration (in particular, generative graphics), but can also be used for sound manipulation, networking, hardware integration and much more. Processing projects normally build as applications / applets and as of recently include an option to export to Javascript, allowing scripts to be run in a browser on an HTML5 canvas element.
The 10 year anniversary event itself was a test of endurance. 50 minutes of stomach turning, rage-inducing code pr0n, boasting an incredible collection of videos. These featured work from infamous artists/codes/hackers, and showed just how powerful Processing can be.
Interim Camp
We’re big fans of generative landscapes, and Fields’ Interim Camp video was a brilliant example of it done in an amazing way. The video was like exploring a strange alien planet flying over fields of fluid-like moving vertices, rising and falling to create sweeping mountain ranges and deep valleys comprised of thousands of triangles, correlating to create a huge mesh of colour. To add to the the obscure journey we were on, a custom soundtrack was created producing an even more ethereal journey thought the vast, brightly coloured Class-Q planet. What’s even more amazing is that Field have used the technique in some commercial work for the likes of AOL.
More info on the process and concept here.
Catalina
Moullinex’s video for the song Catalina was also on show. This piece featured Kinnect data being used and re-worked to create amazing visuals. Using a depth point cloud received from a Kinnect, they use Processing to manipulate and clean up the data and then log it, frame by frame, to a file. Having read up on how they created the video, we was a little disappointed to find out that this is where Processing stopped and Cinema 4D carried on. Obviously the level of rendering that was achieved would of been a lot more complex and time consuming in Processing, however, we were at a Processing exhibit and we expected nothing but. (Maybe _some_ post editing). Anyway, the data was then used by a custom Python script. This then produced a huge network of interconnected nodes in 3d space, creating crazy, complex, wireframe looking people playing instruments and standing under umbrella’s. Some cool RGB channel separation and vector based rain made for a visual feast of blobs and lines.
A short how-to, Processing sketch and C4D Scripts are available on Moullinex’s Tumblr.
Audio and beat reaction No. 2 | Processing
Drawing API experiments with code has always been one of my favourite things to do in my spare time. As soon as we saw Diana Lange‘s Processing / audio experiment above we were blown away. The spirographical lines were positioned and rotated on beat detection, and FFT data which is loaded from the sound file. This is one of the prettiest sound visualisations we’ve seen since Robert Hodgin’s Magnetosphere. A visual treat for the eyes.
