Chandler and I are happy to announce a book launch party for Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture at Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles on Saturday, 4 September from 5 – 7pm. Please join us. We’ll have a toast at 6:30 to thank the many book contributors who’ll be there. Champagne and snacks will be served and we’ll have copies of the book on hand. Directions to Telic (951 Chung King Road Los Angeles, CA 90012) are available on their website.

Adam Lerner’s Mixed Taste format (”Tag Team Lectures on Unrelated Topics”) from the MCA Denver was brought to Anderson Ranch for the annual National Council Celebration. I gave a twenty-minute presentation on Data Visualization (based on the Visualization chapter in Form+Code) which was preceded by an amazing presentation on Fly Tying. The question and answer session that followed the presentations was a game where the audience made connections between the topics.

On July 15th, I participated in a one-day conference at the University of Southern California (USC) on the subject of Critical Code Studies. (The area of Critical Code Studies is emerging and it’s currently difficult to distinguish it precisely from the area of Software Studies.)  I made a presentation with Nick Montford and Jeremy Douglass on the subject of a one-line BASIC program for the Commodore 64:

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

The schedule follows:

9-9:20: Welcome
Mark C. Marino, USC

9:25-10:25: Panel 1
Jeremy Douglass, UCSD
Liz Losh, UCI
Marisa Plumb

10:30-11:50: Panel 2
Federica Frabetti, Oxford Brookes University
Tara McPherson, USC
Benjamin Bratton, UCSD
Craig Dietrich, USC

1-2:20: Panel 3
John Williams, Yale University
Aaron Reed, UCSC
Max Feinstein, USC
Brett Stalbaum, UCSD

2:25-3:40: Panel 4
Dave Shepard, UCLA
Evan Buswell, Portland State University
10-Print by Nick Montfort (MIT), Casey Reas (UCLA), and Jeremy Douglass (UCSD)

3:45-4:25: Computer Science Panel
Stephanie August, LMU
Paul Rosenbloom, USC

4:30: Keynote
Wendy Chun, Brown University

I’m teaching a one-week workshop at Anderson Ranch this summer from 26-30 July. The audience is total programming beginners and the topic is Drawing with Processing: An Introduction to Coding. The description follows:

Writing code to draw is a fun, easy way for artists to learn computer programming. We focus on the basic elements of programming and apply them to making digital prints. Processing is an open source programming language and environment for creating images, animation and interaction.

Students write code to create images for high-resolution digital prints using the Processing environment and print on digital printers. No programming experience is necessary, but participants should be very comfortable using computers. Too much programming experience is discouraged.

Short presentations on technique and concept are mixed with studio work sessions. The instructor tutors students individually during studio time. New techniques are introduced in the first three days with concentration on a final project during the last two days.

The details are available on the Anderson Ranch Website.

I’m looking forward to being in London next week for the Decoding the Digital conference at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The two-day event is held in relation to the Decode exhibition, a collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero. The program follows:

Decoding the Digital
Thursday 4 & Friday 5 February
Hochhauser Auditorium, Sackler Centre
10.00-17.30

Day One: Thursday 4 February
10.30 Joseph Watson (Learning & Interpretation, V&A)
10.45 Charlie Gere (Lancaster University)
11.15 Frieder Nake (University of Bremen)
11.45 Roman Verostko (independent artist and historian), “Sixty Years: from brush in hand to brush in machine”
12.15 Discussion and questions from the audience
13.45 Honor Beddard (V&A), Douglas Dodds (V&A) and Patric Prince (independent art historian and collector), “Collecting as an Amateur”
14.30 Anne Morgan Spalter (independent artist and writer) and Michael Spalter  (independent collector), “Creating, Critiquing and Collecting Computer Art”
15.30 Paul Brown and Daniel Brown (independent artists)
16.30 Discussion and questions from the audience

Day Two: Friday 5 February
10.30 Joseph Watson (Learning & Interpretation, V&A)
10.45 Edward Shanken (University of Amsterdam/Donau University)
11.15 Casey Reas (University of California, Los Angeles)
11.45 Karsten Schmidt (independent artist)
12.15 Discussion and questions from the audience
14.00 Louise Shannon (V&A) and Shane Walter (onedotzero)
14.45 Beryl Graham (University of Sunderland/CRUMB)
15.15 Hannah Redler (Science Museum)
16.15 Julius Popp  (independent artist)
16.45 Panel discussion and questions from the audience
Chair: Charlie Gere
Participants: Honor Beddard; Douglas Dodds; Beryl Graham;
Julius Popp; Hannah Redler; Louise Shannon; Shane Walter

I’m giving a public lecture at 6:30pm on 22 September 2009 in Folk Auditorium, University of Akron, Myers School of Art. The lecture is in affiliation with the Collider Exhibition at the Emily Davis Gallery, where I’m exhibiting The Protean Image Machine (2009).

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.

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.