A new group exhibition entitled Art and Electronic Media is opening tomorrow 16 June 2009 at the bitforms gallery in New York. It feature work from Laurie Anderson, Jim Campbell, Tim Hawkinson, Michael Joaquin Grey, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Robert Lazzarini, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Mark Napier, Manfred Mohr, Tony Oursler, Jennifer Steinkamp, Lillian Schwartz and myself. I’m showing Process 8 (Image 2), a print from 2006. The show was curated in concert with the recently published Art and Electronic Media by Edward Shanken (Phaidon, 2009.)

The Chrome Experiments site was launched today to feature the JavaScript potential of the new Google Chrome Web browser. A few of the projects, including my contribution called Twitch, use Processing.js. Processing.js is John Resig’s port of the 2D parts of Processing to JavaScript using the Canvas element. I developed my entire project in Processing and then basically cut and pasted it into an HTML file. And there it was, Processing code running inside a browser without a plugin. Twitch was featured at Technology Review today in the post Browser Coders Make Chrome Shine.

Here are a few developing thoughts about Chrome and Twitch:

- Chrome and its fast JavaScript capability offers a glimpse of a Web without proprietary plug-ins. This allows the code (programs) to run directly in the browser rather than loading, for example, the Shockwave Player (from Adobe) or Java (from Sun). This makes it possible to create visually exciting and interesting works without using proprietary tools (in the case of Flash) and works that are accessible to more people (in the case of Java, because many people don’t have the plug-in). This is how innovation on the Web happened back in the mid-1990s; everyone was always looking at how people did things by looking at their HTML code. It made innovation happen quickly. With Flash and Java programs, you don’t have access to the code.

- The piece I created, Twitch, focuses on the genre of one-button games. This is a game that is played with a minimal interface (just one button) and is easy to figure out. I worked to create nine complementary pieces. First, you figure out the controls and then you figure out what to do, without instructions and in a short time. It’s a light piece, meant for enjoyment.

- Technically, I think the greatest innovation of Chrome is launching each Window or Tab as a separate process. If you try to run Twitch on Firefox it starts to slow down as more windows open. Each mini-game competes for the same resources from the computer’s processor. In Chrome, because each window runs separately, the frame rate remains high.

The ART AND CODE workshops and symposium at Carnegie Mellon wrapped up today. It was an amazing event organized by Golan Levin. It was a pleasure to see old friends from vvvv, Max/MSP/Jitter, openFrameworks, Pure Data, and to meet the creators of Scratch and Hackety Hack. There were nine separate Processing workshops sessions, two from myself, Ben Fry, Ira Greenberg, and three from Dan Shiffman. The topics ranged from a “patient” introduction (me), to a focus on information visualization (Fry), advanced techniques (Shiffman), and a session for educators (Greenberg). As a result of conversations and presentations, I’m very excited about Scratch and Ruby for their potential to teach programming in alternative ways and in alternative contexts. (I’m a little late to get on that train, but better now than even later.) The presentations will hopefully be archived online and the event was intensely tweeted.

And, we made some exciting decisions about the future of Processing during the concurrent Oxford Project 3 event. Andres Colubri made great progress.

I’m showing work in a group show at the BANK gallery in Los Angeles from 21 Feb - 28 Mar 2009. The opening is 21 Feb from 6-8pm. I’m showing a new software work (pictured above) and prints from the Tissue series. The press release reads:

BANK is pleased to announce the group exhibition, “I’ll be your mirror,” showcasing a selection of artists from the gallery’s program. Although divergent in their practices, there are two distinct themes that emerge amongst the seven artists exhibiting. C.E.B. Reas, Ann Diener, Fran Siegel, and Enrique Castrejon, take the formal aspects of drawing as a point of departure for collage, installation and new media, whereas concepts stemming from advertising, consumerism and excess are seen in the works of Kim Schoen, Osman Khan and Bari Ziperstein.

This is BANK’s final exhibition prior to transitioning to a Project Space set to launch in fall of ‘09.

The Oxford Project is continuing in early March, but not physically in Oxford, OH this time. We’re descending upon Pittsburgh to work on the next Processing release. Ben Fry, Ira Greenberg, Dan Shiffman, Andres Colubri, and myself will work on the GStreamer integration (goodbye QuickTime) and other improvements.

Why Pittsburgh? We’re going to participate in the ART AND CODE symposium and workshops, organized by Golan Levin:

Art and Code is a symposium on programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us. The event takes place the weekend of March 7-9, 2009 on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. It features hands-on workshops and a conference showcase for eight different creative toolkits — programming languages made by artists, for artists.

This is a very exciting event with fascinating, emerging programming environments presented through workshops and lectures:

Alice, Hackety Hack, Max/MSP/Jitter, openFrameworks, Processing, Scratch, vvvv.

Giant Eagle Auditorium, here we come.

I’m speaking at Gallery 400’s Voices Lecture Series on 17 Feb 2009 at 5pm. Gallery 400, “a center for art exhibition and discourse at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was founded … to exhibit and support innovations in contemporary art, design and architecture.”

I’m participating in a symposium directed by Golan Levin and Jeremy Ficca on the topics of generative form and digital fabrication at Carnegie Mellon from 3-7 February:

Algorithmic processes, harnessed through the medium of code, allow creators to generate complex forms and organic structures by the application of elementary but carefully-tuned sets of rules. Digital fabrication systems, such as computer-controlled laser cutters, 3D printers, and machining systems, offer a nearly instantaneous way of exploring ideas in new spatial and material formats. The combination of these two approaches represents an extreme but growing position in art and design, wherein the traditions of hand-craft are exchanged almost entirely for the unprecedented possibilities made possible through a demanding new form of mind-craft.

In this mini-symposium, we present four practitioners – C.E.B. Reas, Marius Watz, Ben Pell, and MOS Architects (directed by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample) – who are refiguring the material world through rule systems and digital fabrication tools. Their work spans the disciplines of art, design, architecture, and engineering; the objectives of provocation, of utility, and of pure aesthetic delight; and the realms of bits, atoms, and ideas. All of these practitioners have singularly rigorous personal aesthetics and sensitive understandings of how the arts can transform the way we live. In their contrasting approaches at the limits of digital craft we can catch a glimpse of a new humanism in our increasingly computer-articulated environments.

The schedule follows:

3 Feb 2009, 5-6pm. McConomy Hall: C.E.B. Reas and Marius Watz dialog
4 Feb 2009, 12-1pm. MM203: Reas, Watz, Pell, Ficca, Levin discussion
4 Feb 2009, 5-6pm. Giant Eagle Auditorium: Ben Pell lecture
5 Feb 2009, 5-6pm. Giant Eagle Auditorium: MOS Architects lecture

There’s more information at the CMU site.

Marius Watz and I have an upcoming exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts from 7 Feb - 19 April 2009. The opening is 7 Feb from 5:30-8:30pm. This will be the first time Marius and I are exhibiting together after and I’m sincerely looking forward to it. I’ll be showing work from my Process/Form solo show at the bitforms gallery nyc in spring 2008. This new exhibition is in association with the Code, Form, Space Symposium at Carnegie Mellon University 3-7 Feb 2009. The image above is a crop of Process 18 (Object 1), photo by Marius Watz.

If you follow tennis, please check out Serena Williams’ dress at the 2009 Australian Open. (She won her first match today.) The dress is a collaboration between Nike, 1 of 1 studio (Cait Reas), and myself. The initial printed pattern was created by Serena through using the Protean Image software.

I found this quote from Ms. Williams on the Australian Open website:

I love patterns. . . I’m really inspired by prints. I remember I was sitting in my apartment and I literally had to go to, like, different pages on the computer and kind of graphically design the pattern. So it was interesting. It was just really weird concepts. We came up with some circles and some lines, just kind of things like that. It was cool.

After that visit, image refinement and printing tests led to the final design (pictured above). The final image was rendered at 16,384 x 12,288 pixels and printed onto a treated high-performance textile. The dress body was developed by Nike. One year after the process started, Ms. Williams is wearing the dress this week. Thanks to Elaine Lucius for setting this up!