Visual programming languages, languages that create programs by the manipulation of graphical elements, as opposed to specifying lines of text, have seen an increased popularity in recent years both in audio and video synthesis. Some of the more well-known environments, ones that are regularly used for projects that are featured on CAN,  include VVVV (real-time motion graphics and physical IO)  MAX/MSP (real-time music and multimedia), Pure Data (ostensibly an open source equivalent of MAX/MSP) and Quartz Composer (video synthesis for MAC).

Visual programming owes its many of its conventions for the representation of information and programs from Flowcharts – a lesser used term for these kinds of environments is Data-flow Programming. VPL’s date back to the late 60′s. A good example is the GraIL system (GRaphical Input Language) a flowchart language entered on a graphics tablet developed by the Rand Corporation in 1969.

DMX-LED Patches – Kalle Karlen

Continue reading.... Patch Schematics – The Aesthetics of Constraint / Best Practices [Theory]

Created in collaboration with more than 70 media artists and developers from across the world, Written Images is the first of its kind, a ‘programmed book’, continuously regenerated for the digital printing process, offering each reader a unique experience.

The team, including Martin Fuchs and Peter Bichsel first announced their project in February 2010. Since then, more than 70 image generating software programs were submitted. A jury, including myself, singled out the 42 most creative and successful submissions to be included in the book.

Now, with your support the team hopes to produce the first edition of this unique book and also introduce the “Written Images” print-on-demand service. Please support the project by donating as little as $15 giving you in return one-of-a-kind single postcard (select the artist of your choice). $60 will get you one-of-a-kind set of 42 postcards, and with $200 you will receive the one-of-a-kind Written Images book, surely to be a collectors item. In any case, whichever donation you choose, you are above all supporting this fantastic project!

Support on Kickstarter!

Artists: 386dx25, Antoni Kaniowski, Ariel Malka, Carl-Johan Rosén, Casey Reas,clone, David Bollinger, David Bouchard, e m o c, flight404, Golan Levin,Jonathan McCabe, Jörg Piringer, Julien Deswaef, Kim Asendorf, kraftner,Leonardo Solaas, Lia, Luke Sturgeon, Marcin Ignac, Marius Watz, Michael Zick Doherty, Mitchell Whitelaw, Moka, Nervous System, Oliver Smith, paolon,Perceptor, rhymeandreason, Ricard Marxer, Roberto Christen, Rui Madeira,Ryan Alexander, Ryland Wharton, Sansumbrella, sojamo, Stefano Maccarelli,Szymon Kaliski, Victor Martins, W:Blut, William Lindmeier, zenbullets.

About:

Digital technologies are successful tools in contemporary design. No matter whether the material is processed by handicraft or digitally altered, the artist always creates out of his very own inspiration. He or she develops the rules of aesthetics which will be valid for their work. These rules will be played with and altered until the pre-defined final product comes into being. Within this work process the computer is not so much seen as a medium, but rather as a programmed simulator consisting of various materials and means to allow analogue steps. This is the point at which generative art starts and helps generating products with the help of self-programmed, digital tools. A single impulse leads to a chain reaction of processes which are defined through mathematical relations. Read more..

UPDATE 01/03/2011: Video of the image rendering queue program added below, 100xfaster. Made with openFrameworks.

Very small selection of images:

Written Images Website:

But Lopes is also a philosopher and philosophers seek to, among other things, define categories. Painting, sculpture, dance; these categorized mediums have all served us well over the years and so the thinking goes, why not extend them and add another: Computer Art. I’m not so sure that the idea of Computer Art as, with an admittedly blunt reduction, “stuff on a computer that allows you to participate in it presenting itself” is particularly useful. My feeling is that this isn’t what interactive art or art made in collaboration with computers is presently nor is it a meaningful extent of what it should be. The device is not the method, nor is the extent of what makes this type of artwork rich and meaningful and computers aren’t really the medium: algorithm and computation are the medium. In Form+Code, Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams are right to point to Sol Lewitt as an earlier exponent of explicitly algorithmic art and tie that into the current computational and algorithmic art-makers. A computer originally was one who did computation, that is, a person sitting with a slide rule, pen, and paper and was only later applied to machines. The idea of computation is that it offloads a pre-existing human capacity, accentuates pre-existing things in the world. The person who calls their friend on their cellphone describes their action as “calling my friend” not “using my cellphone”. The person using Ken Goldbergs TeleGarden (a work mentioned frequently in APAC) is marveling at how they can collaboratively participate in creating a garden, not at how they can control a machine via a network. The point is not the device — the point is interactive computation, extension of human aptitude and capacity, and the type of relationship with the world that it enables. His insistence on the primacy of mediums and forms is doubly odd because in his finale Lopes emphasizes that “computer art takes advantage of computational processing to achieve user interaction”. Close, but not quite there.

I’m nitpicking, and admittedly so, because he’s looking at works that are unmistakably “Computer Art” by his definition of it. Computer Art is meant to be a measure of degrees, a spectrum. One looks at Scott Snibbes work and sees a computer system and an interactivity. Golden Calf, a work he references multiple times, is very firmly at the Computer Art circle in the Venn diagram of machine-human art-making experience. These are the easy examples, those that lend themselves most easily to the account of interaction in artworks that he describes. But I’m nitpicking for a reason: it’s painfully limiting. It says that computer art is things that are run on a computer with which I interact and observe a display where I consequently understand how my actions are interpreted.

This seems naïve to the ways that computation actually functions in our lives and an oversimplification of how people think that computation can function in their lives. This also seems to be reductive of what forms art can take and how the conversation that is art-making can evolve. For instance: Wafaa Bilals Domestic Tension, a piece far more indebted to performance art than sculptural installation. There’s quite a bit more at play there than myself seeing the manipulation of pixels and there’s more to my understanding of how this piece functions and signifies than understanding that I’m speaking with and through a computer.

Another example: Men in Grey. Is this interactive art? Not in many senses, I never interacted with it nor would I say that interacting with it is necessary to understand it and experience it. It has far more in common with Situationist/Lettrist works than with installation art, and yet it is computer based, one does interact with it by well-known protocols and through well-established rules, it has a display. It uses computation and networks and yet it’s not about manipulating a computer or a network to create display elements nor is that the forefront of it. Nor are EyeWriter, Natural Fuse, and a slew of other works and projects that I find most meaningful and engaging.

In philosophy of aesthetics at times philosophically strong categories sometimes are preferred over meaningful categories because of the defensibility of strong categories. Painting as a category of artwork is not deeply meaningful in many ways (consider the question “do you like paintings?”) yet determining how much something is and is not a painting is quite easy and categorically meaningful. “Minimal” as a style (ones furniture or aesthetic) or strategy (“minimalism” with attendant connotation) is a much more meaningful designation because it has historical precedents, significations, and because it extends beyond a particular category to cover a manner of production and reception. That is, it describes communicative strategies, which Lopes indicates is one of the goals of the interactivity in Computer Art. However “minimal” is a terrifically difficult thing to pin down into categories and yet it is descriptive, historical, and fundamentally meaningful as a description of an aesthetic practice. To play a small linguistic game, describing speech as “he spoke with words” is a bit odd; to describe it as “he spoke with silence” makes more sense because one does not normally make speech with silence. Likewise Computer Art seems primarily to describe a situation of abnormality, “this is art that involves you interacting with a computer”, that I believe few people actually find particularly abnormal and that will be less meaningful, if not near meaningless, in the near future.

Lopes text is an excellent opening of what I hope will be an interesting discussion that attempts to unravel the relationship between new forms of narrative, expression, and communication and the previous ones. He weaves together an excellent web of references from Umberto Eco to Clement Greenberg to Lev Manovich and references a wisely chosen group of artworks to bolster his argument. The example of A Philosophy of Computer Art is in it’s handling of complex arguments against the sort of odd disqualifications that occasionally are leveled against Computer Art. It’s insistence on categorical logic and mediums as definitive categories is a small aberation in what is otherwise an excellent text and opening of a new type of discourse about what creative computing might possibly mean.

apoca.mentalpaint.net

Purchase on amazon.com / amazon.co.uk

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer “Blow Up”, 2007

Daniel Rozin “Wooden Mirror”, 1999

Scott Snibbe “Boundary Functions”, 1998

Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv “Text Rain”, 1999

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Joshua Noble is a writer, designer, and programmer based in Portland, Oregon and New York City. He’s the author of, most recently, Programming Interactivity and the forthcoming book Research for Living.
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NodeBox 2 is a new Mac and Windows software application for creating generative art using procedural graphics. Written in Python, and inspired by it’s written code Mac only predecessor NodeBox, the new version is object based oriented programming at its front with ability to create your own operations by changing code for any existing nodes.

Similarly to QuarzComposer or Graphic Toolbox, you create effects/modifiers by combining different nodes. Nodes, for the time being are a collection of basic shapes and standard modifiers such as copy, translate, grid but of course considering you can modify all of these and create your own, you knowledge of Python will decide how far you can take the app.

NodeBox is free and open-source and developed by Frederik De Bleser and Tom De Smedt.

You can download and try the application here.

See also NodeBox research site.

(via interactiondesign.se)

Inspired by the Rhonda Forever project, the OpenEndedGroup team have polished their 3d freehand drawing tool in Field. If you are unfamiliar with Field, it is an open-source tool platform for digital art and experimental code writing  that brings together the wonders of Processing with visual programming. We have already mentioned Field few months back and found it a great platform not only for creating Processing sketches but for those wanting to learn processing and python too.

The main difference between Rhonda and the Field feature is that it allows doodling in 3d and in code simultaneously. See movie below.

more info @ openendedgroup.com

In 1963, my dad was looking for a job. Born in England and raised in Africa, he ended up in London after a few years of travel by ship and train. In those pre-pre-Craigslist days, people still searched for employment in newspapers, and an unusual listing in a London Newspaper caught his eye: a listing looking for computer operators. For my father, the listing raised two immediate questions: What is a computer? And how do you operate it? (A similar reaction would have come from job listings for auto mechanics in 1914 or web designers in 1994). Responding to that listing turned out to be a life-changing decision for my dad, who has spent the last 40 years working with computers and technology. A very similar directional moment came for me 24 years later, in 1987, when my dad arrived home from work with a Macintosh SE computer

HyperCard, Revisited

The Mac SE was actually not as important to my life (and career) as was the software that came with it for free – in particular, an unusual and innovative application called HyperCard. HyperCard was a tool for making tools – Mac users could use Hypercard to build their own mini-programs to balance their taxes, manage sports statistics, make music – all kinds of individualized software that would be useful (or fun) for individual users. These little programs were called stacks, and were built as a system of cards that could be hyperlinked together. Building a HyperCard stack was remarkably easy, and the application quickly developed a devoted following.

HyperCard was the brain child of Bill Atkinson, one of Apple’s earliest employees, and the software engineer responsible for (among other things) the drop-down menu, the selection tool, and tabbed navigation. Bill played a big role in making the Mac what the Mac was – a personal computer that made the whole process of computing easy for the general public. HyperCard represented perhaps the bravest part of this ‘computing for the people’ philosophy, as it enabled users to go past the pre-built software that came on the machines, and to program and build software of their own.

Assuming that a typical computer would and could learn how to may program seem like a mad idea, but its one that has a long legacy. When personal computers were first envisioned in the 1960s, scenarios included the owners of these machines making their own software. The small group of people who were working in computing probably couldn’t imagine why anyone would want a computer if they didn’t know how to program it! With HyperCard, the learning process was facilitated by pre-built UI elements, and a simple drag & drop interface. Maybe most important, though, was HyperCard’s unique, innovative, and very easy to use programming language, HyperTalk.

Say That again, in English?

Reading programming instructions written in some languages can be confusing. Statements in HyperTalk, on the other hand, tend to read like sentences in English. For example, if I wanted to create a variable called ‘name’ with the string ‘bob dole’ in it, I would write this:

put 'bob dole' into name

If I wanted to put the last name into a list of last names that I had already created, I could do this:

put the second word of name into last_names

And if I wanted to display the name on screen, I would simply write:

put name into field 'name_display'

This type of plain-language programming makes sense, particularly in an application that was designed specifically for non-programmers. I have been teaching programming to designers and artists for nearly a decade, and I find the largest concern for learners to be not with the conceptual hurdles involved in writing a program, but with obscure and confusing syntax requirements. I would love to be able to teach HyperTalk to my students, as a smooth on-road to more complex languages like Java or ActionScript.

HyperTalk wasn’t just easy, it was also fairly powerful. Complex object structures could be built to handle complicated tasks, and the base language could be expanded by a variety of available externdal commands and functions (XCMDs and XFCNs, respectively), which were precursors to the modern plug-in.

Programming for the People

This combination of ease of use and power resonated with the HyperCard user base, who developed and shared thousands of unique stacks (all in a time before the web). A visit to a BBS in the late 80s and early 90s could give a modem-owner access to thousands of unique, often home-made tools and applications. Stacks were made to record basketball statistics, to teach music theory, and to build complex databases. The revolutionary non-linear game Myst first appeared as a HyperCard stack, and the Beatles even got into the scene, with an official stack A Hard Days Night.

During the same time, developers made hundreds of extensions. Some let HyperCard stacks talk to other applications on your computer (opening the door to the first computer virus, ‘Concept’, in 1993). Other let you communicate to the outside world – BeeHive Technology’s ADB I/) box was a kind of ‘Arduino for the 80′s, and let stack-makers connect to sensors and send commands to electronics. A large community formed around HyperCard, providing tips & resources as well as a distribution channel for home-brew software makers.

The HyperCard Legacy

Over the last few years, we’ve seen many exciting projects that work in the spirit of HyperCard – projects that offer free and simple ways to create custom software tools. Replace the word ‘HyperCard’ in the paragraphs above with ‘Processing’ and the word ‘stack’ with the word’sketch’, and many of the innovations and advantages described can be moved 20 years into the future without much of a re-write.

HyperCard was the first real hyper-media program, paving the way for the web, and everything that came with it. It was used by thousands of people, and by most accounts, seemed to have been a fairly successful piece of software. Which, of course, begs the question: What happened to HyperCard?

A small project in the larger suite of Mac software, HyperCard never really saw the type of development commitment that it would need to remain current as the Mac OS advanced. The small, black-and white application looked more and more antiquated as screens got bigger and more colorful. To compound matters, the project was shuffled back and forth between Mac and its software subsidiary Claris and seemed never to get any kind of sure footing. Though a second version of Hypercard was released in 1990, the project had made few advances since its release five years earlier.

Ultimately, HyperCard would disappear from Mac computers by the mid-nineties, eclipsed by web browsers and other applications which it had itself inspired. The last copy of HyperCard was sold by Apple in 2004.

The Importance of Middle Ground

In new media, practitioners are often identified with the specific tools that they use. I started out as a ‘Flash guy’ and over the last few years have been connected more and more with the open source software project Processing. Though I originally came to Processing to escape the Flash Player’s then sluggish performance, I value the platform as much for its ease of use and its teachability as I do for its ability to quickly add floating point numbers. Lately, I’ve been asked the same question, over and over again:

‘Why don’t you move to OpenFrameworks? It’s much faster!’

It is true that projects built in OF run faster than those built in Processing. This question, though, seems to be missing a key point: faster does not always equal better. Does every pianist want to play the pipe organ because it has more keys? Is a car better than a bicycle?

In my case, choosing a platform to work with involves as much consideration to simplicity as it does to complexity. I am an educator, and when I work on a project I am always thinking about how the things that are learned in the process can be packaged and shared with my students and with the public.

Which brings us to the broader concept of accessibility. HyperCard effectively disappeared a decade a go, making way for supposedly bigger and better things. But in my mind, the end of HyperCard left a huge gap that desperately needs to be filled – a space for an easy to use, intuitive tool that will once again let average computer users make their own tools. Such a project would have huge benefits for all of us, wether we are artists, educators, entrepreneurs, or enthusiasts.

HyperCard, Revisited

Over the years, there have been several attempts to revive HyperCard, most recently on the web. TileStack is HyperCard for a social media world, a site in which users can build their own stacks, program them with HyperTalk, and share them with friends. It’s a bit of a time capsule, with many classic HyperCard stacks available to satisfy any nostalgic cravings for B&W pixel art you may be harbouring. Unfortunately, HyperCard, as much as we might love it, is 25 years old. These big initiatives to revive it directly end up looking and feeling antiquated.

I could imagine a new version of HyperCard being built from the ground up around its core functional properties: HyperTalk, easy to use UI elements, and a framework for extensions. It’s the kind of open source project that could happen, but with so much investment already existing in other initiatives such as Processing and OpenFrameworks, it might not be the best use of resources. So, let’s forget for now about a resurrection. Instead of thinking bigger, let’s think smaller.

HyperCard for the iPhone?

It might not be as crazy as you think. Imagine having a single, meta app that could be used to make smaller ones. This ‘App-Builder App’, like HyperCard, could combine easy to use, draggable user interface elements with an intuitive, plain language scripting language. As a quick visit to the App Store will show you, many or most of the apps available today could be built without complex coding. You don’t need Objective C to make a stock ticker, or a unit converter, or a fart machine. These home-made apps could be shared and adapted, cross-bred and mutated to create generation after generation of useful (and not so useful programs).

By putting the tools of creation into the hands of the broader userbase, we would allow for the creation of ultra-specific personalized apps that, aside from a few exceptions, don’t exist today. We’d also get access to a vastly larger creative pool. There are undoubtedly many excellent and innovative ideas out there, in the heads of people who don’t (yet) have the programming skills to realize them. The next Myst is waiting to be built, along with countless other novel tools and applications.

With the developer restrictions and extreme proprietism of the iPhone App Store, it’s hard to remember the Apple of the 80s. Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson and their team had a vision to not only bring computers to the people, but also to bring computer programming to the public – to make makers out of the masses. At Apple, this philosophy, along with HyperCard seems to have mostly been lost. In the open source community, though, this ideal is alive and well – it may be that by reviving some ideas from the past we might be able to create a HyperCard for the future.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

The Processing software is free and it runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats.

Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda’s students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.

Read more about the press release on createdigitalmotion.com 

The Processing website (www.processing.org) includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples.

Processing on the web:
OpenProcessing Exhibition
Processing Blogs
Processing @ Vimeo
Processing @ del.icio.us
Processing @ Flickr
Processing @ YouTube
Processing @ Technorati

Relentless, The REV from flight404 on Vimeo.