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

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.

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!

The A+D Museum in Los Angeles was the site for the Design Process Innovation Symposium on 6 Dec 2008 from 10am to 6pm. I was a “featured speaker.” The organizers at Gensler wrote:

Innovation affords designers new opportunities from idea generation to product manufacturing, while expanding the relevance of their design product and confronting the issues presented by a changing world. While today’s designers have at their disposal powerful digital design software and fabrication machines, technology is just one aspect of a wider process revolution being driven by globalization, compressed time-to-market, ecological sensitivity and increased sophistication in consumer taste. This symposium brings together experts from a variety of design disciplines to analyze trends, share ideas, and look at the future of the design process.

Despite the generic description, it was a great event. I particularly enjoyed the presentations by Gaston Nogue (Ball-Nogues) and Elena Manferdini (Atelier Manferdini). The complete lineup is posted at Gensler’s website.

On May 21st, I’ll be driving down to San Diego to talk about “software studies.” As defined by the organizers:

Following on the first Software Studies Workshop organized by Matthew Fuller (Rotterdam, 2006), the Software Studies Workshop @ UCSD (21 – 22 May) is a foundational event bringing together key U.S. figures in this emerging area. The workshop will discuss what it means to study software cultures, and the direction and goals of Software Studies as an emerging movement. Our goal is for the workshop to result in publishing a founding statement on the field, as well as initiate a set of interdisciplinary project collaborations. The workshop is sponsored by Calit2, CRCA, HASTAC, UCDARNet, and the UCSD Visual Arts Department.

The Pecha Kucha on Wednesday afternoon is open to the public. Seating is limited and RSVP is required. For more information visit the website.

Participants include Ian Bogost (Georgia Institute of Technology), Geoff Bowker (Santa Clara University), Benjamin Bratton (UCLA), Matt Fuller (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Kate Hayles (UCLA), Matt Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland), Peter Lunenfeld (Art Center College of Design), Mark Marino (USC), Michael Mateas (UCSC), Nick Montfort (MIT), Rita Raley (UCSB), C.E.B. Reas (UCLA), Warren Sack (UCSC), Doug Sery (MIT Press), Chandler McWilliams (UCLA), Lev Manovich (UCSD), Noah Wardrip-Fruin (UCSD), Jeremy Douglass (UCSD), Amy Alexander (UCSD), Barry Brown (UCSD), Jordan Crandall (UCSD), Kelly Gates (UCSD), Brian Goldfarb (UCSD), Jim Hollan (UCSD), Stefan Tanaka (UCSD), and Geoff Voelker (UCSD).

The NODE08 forum for digital arts takes place in Frankfurt from 5 -12 April 2008. I’m giving a lecture called “Form + Code” on Tuesday and teaching a workshop on making prints with Processing the next day. The lecture is about a new book that I’m currently preparing with Chandler McWilliams (more about that later). Check out the complete schedule for more information.