prehysteries of new media: >> processing

<< preface

this blog is nina wenhart's collection of resources on the various histories of new media art. it consists mainly of non or very little edited material i found flaneuring on the net, sometimes with my own annotations and comments, sometimes it's also textparts i retyped from books that are out of print.

it is also meant to be an additional resource of information and recommended reading for my students of the prehystories of new media class that i teach at the school of the art institute of chicago in fall 2008.

the focus is on the time period from the beginning of the 20th century up to today.

2008-07-07

>> processing

on www.proce55ing.net:
"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."

(http://www.proce55ing.net/copyright.html:)
"Processing was started in Fall 2001 by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. Fry was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Laboratory and Reas was an Associate Professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. While Fry and Reas were employees of these institutions, Processing began as a personal initiative and development took place during the night and weekends through 2003. MIT indirectly funded Processing through Fry's graduate stipend and Ivrea indirectly funded Processing through Reas's salary. Due to his research agreement with MIT, all code written by Fry during this time is copyright MIT.

In summer 2003, Ivrea funded four individuals to work on the project for a few months. This resulted in Dan Mosedale's preprocessor using Antlr and Sami Arola's contributions to the graphics engine. The code for these elements are both copyright 2003 Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

In August 2003, Reas left the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and in June 2004, Fry left the MIT Media Laboratory. The code and complete reference written since June 2004 are copyright Ben Fry and Casey Reas.

Portions of the code were written by other contributors and are attributed in the source code. For example, portions of the graphics engine were written by Karsten Schmidt. There are many contributions to the Exhibition and Examples on the Processing.org website and these are attributed in context.

The Reference for the Language and Environment are under a Creative Commons license which makes it possible to re-use this content for non-commercial purposes if it is credited."

eamples of artworks done with processing:

- Golan Levin, "The Dumpster"
- LIA
- Casey Reas, "Microimage"
- Ben Fry, "Valence"
- Josh On, "Inequality"
- Marius Watz, "C Drawer"
- Ed Burton, "SodaProcessing"
- JonahBrucker-Gohen, "Tech Support"
- Justin Manor, "Presidential Discombobulator"
- Alvaro Cassinelli, "Khronos Projector"
- Art+Com, "Process"
- Philip Worthington, "Shadow Monsters"
- rAndom international, "Pixel Roller"

"Processing is written in Java and enables the creation of Java Applications and Applets within a carefully designed set of constraints. It uses a 2D/3D Java rendering API that is a cross between postscript-style imaging in 2D and 3D rendering with OpenGL. Through developing Processing as a solid and general technical platform, we hope teaching the concepts of interaction and computer programming will focus more on the qualities and content of medium, rather than the technology." (http://www.groupc.net/2002/proce55ing/index.html)