Processing.org Exhibition now curated by FV [News]

From September 2010, myself with CreativeApplications.Net will be the curator of the online exhibition of projects on Processing.org. It’s a great privilege and pleasure to contribute to the almost 10 year old open source project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Processing has won hearts and minds of many artists, researchers, designers and architects over the years and still remains one of the most used creative code programming environments. Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios. Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects. CAN has posted some of these but processing.org/exhibition/ still remains an archive of some of the most amazing Processing projects out there. It’s also easy to get the quick sense of how Processing has changed over the years by looking at the exhibition, from Applets to large installations. The original idea was simple; to show what Processing can do. A priority in recent years has been to show the range of what is possible (fabrication, installation, rendered video) in addition to realtime graphics – Casey writes. From this month very few carefully selected projects shown on CAN will make their way to the exhibition.

We kick things off with the wonderful Understanding Shakespeare by Stephan Thiel. In case you missed it, see this post on CAN.
Understanding Shakespeare is an attempt to create a new visual understanding of the work by analysing most frequently used words for each character. Using Processing, a scene is represented by a block of text and scaled relatively according to its number of words. Characters are ordered by appearance from left to right throughout the play. The major character’s speeches are highlighted to illustrate their amounts of spoken words as compared to the rest of the play…more

Additionally to the above, Stephan and two fellow designers are trying to give something back to the Processing community. They are providing teaching materials available at www.creativecoding.org which they use at various german universities. So far, these have developed into a well known resource among german designers and media artists and the team hopes to translate them to english soon.

We leave you with 10 of the 144 projects that have made their way to the Processing exhibition, starting with Valence by Ben Fry (2002) and ending One Perfect Cube by Florian Jenett (2010). See all at processing.org/exhibition/