Miami University (in Oxford, Ohio) deserves special recognition for making this working session a reality.

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

+ At New York University’s graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.

+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.

+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.

+ Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.

+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing.

+ The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki.

+ The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project.

+ The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research.

The Processing software 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. Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.

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.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (a Smithsonian Institution) included Processing in its National Design Triennial. Works created with Processing were featured prominently in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the Museum of Modern Art. Numerous design magazines, including Print, Eye, and Creativity, have highlighted the software.

For their work on Processing, Fry and Reas received the 2008 Muriel Cooper Prize from the Design Management Institute. The Processing community was awarded the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the 2005 Interactive Design Prize from the Tokyo Type Director’s Club.

The Processing website (www.processing.org) includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples. The Discourse forum hosts continuous community discussions and dialog with the developers.

Download images and more text about Processing:
www.processing.org/about/processing-1.0.zip

Questions and Answers:

What is new in Processing 1.0?
The most important aspect of this release is its stability. However, we have added many new features during the last few months. They include a new optimized 2D graphics engine, better integration for working with vector files, and the ability to write tools to enhance the development environment.

Who uses Processing?
Processing is used by a very diverse group of people, from children first exploring computer programming to professional artists, designers, architects, engineers, and scientists. Processing has a shallow learning curve to make writing code easier for beginners, but it also allows more experienced programmers to write sophisticated software. We’ve seen the number of people using Processing double each year for the last three years. The increased stability of the software and the publication of six related books in the last two years are the likely reasons for this increase.

What is the future of Processing?
The 1.0 version of Processing focuses on education and software sketching (prototyping). The next major release of the software will focus on professional users while retaining the simplicity that is Processing’s trademark. Specifically, future releases will increase the speed of programs that work with video and complex 3D graphics.

Books about Processing:
Fry, Ben. Visualizing Data. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2008.
Greenberg, Ira. Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art. Berkeley, CA: Friends of Ed, an Apress Co, 2007.
Igoe, Tom. Making Things Talk. Make: projects. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2007.
Reas, Casey, and Ben Fry. Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007.
Shiffman, Daniel. Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier, 2008.

Kenya Hara
September 30, 2008, 6:00 pm
Kenya Hara is interested in designing “circumstances” or “conditions” rather than “things.” A graphic designer and Professor at the Musashino Art university, Hara has been an Art director of MUJI since 2002.

Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
October 29, 2008, 6:00 pm
Miller explores the overall theme of sound in contemporary art, digital media, and composition. He reconstructs the history of sound and recorded media by several of the most well known artists of their field.

The Yes Men
November 20, 2008, 6:00 pm
The Yes Men are a merry troupe of imposters who have poked fun at some of the world’s biggest corporate criminals. They are most well known for impersonating the WTO– the subject of a feature film and book– but they have had dozens of other escapades fighting corporate crime with words, glue, and rubberbands.

Clay Shirky
January 13, 2009, 6:00 pm
Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He divides his time on consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.

Steven Heller
January 28, 2009, 6:00 pm
Heller is an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and for almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. Currently, he is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department, Special Consultant to the President of SVA for New Programs, and writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review.

United Visual Artists
February 10, 2009, 6:00 pm
United Visual Artists is a British-based collective whose current practice spans permanent architectural installation, live performace and responsive installation. Research and development is a core part of their process — enabling them to constantly explore new fields.

Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers
April 7, 2009, 6:00 pm
Franceschini is an artist and educator. She founded Futurefarmers in 1995 to bring together multidisciplinary practitioners to create new work. She is currently teaching media theory and practice courses at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Kryzsztof Wodiczko
April 21, 2009, 6:00 pm
Woriczko is internationally renowned for his largescale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has developed a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless and immigrant operators that function as implements for survival, communication, empowerment, and healing.

Natalie Jeremijenko
May 5, 2009, 6:00 pm
Jeremijenko is an artists, inventor, and engineer with the mission to reclaim technology from idealized, abstract concepts and to apply it to the messy complexities of the real world, often with disquieting results.

A photography studio-residence currently being designed by davidclovers is the subject of a collaborative research between davidclovers and myself. 07 MASSES explores the specific impact of luminosity and texture on mass and massiveness through a series of scaled prototypes. I developed software that was used to generate the pattern embedded in the surface of the structure. The model, developed by davidclovers in summer 2008, is currently on exhibition at Artist Space in New York in the show Matters of Sensation. The show runs from 25 Sep to 22 Nov 2008.

This course is an introduction to concepts of interactivity. We discuss what constitutes interactive work and how aesthetic and conceptual concerns can impact interactive design while developing computer programming skills required for creating interactivity. The concepts and skills taught in this course set a foundation for future DMA courses about the Internet, game design, and media arts.

This class is mandatory for all sophomore and incoming transfer students. I firmly believe that everyone studying the visual arts in the twenty-first century needs to be introduced to what the computer can do beyond its use as a production tool.

Miami University is generously funding a series of Processing development workshops. The first workshop took place from 18 to 21 September. Ben Fry, Dan Shiffman, Ira Greenberg, and myself worked together to improve the examples, start a series of tutorials, and work through some conceptual issues related to adding a new PShape class. Additional topics included the future of Processing’s libraries and other implementations of Processing (C++, Ruby, Python, etc.) Ira Greenberg, an associate professor at Miami and author of “Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art”, got this started and we’re very grateful for the support of the Interactive Media Studies (IMS) program, directed by Glenn Platt. The next Oxford Project will take place from 20 to 23 November.

TI will be shown at the The 5th Seoul International Media Art Biennale which takes place at the Seoul Museum of Art. The exhibition is open from 12 September to 5 November 2008. I’m very honored to be showing my work with Julien Maire, Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, and many other excellent artists. There’s more information on the Media_City Seoul website.

The Tissue Collection, created in collaboration with 1 of 1 Studio, will be exhibited at C.STEM in Turin, Italy from 19 to 27 September, 2008. The exhibition takes place at the Ex-Chiesa Metodista (via Lagrange 13, 10122 Torino.) The event is conceived and curated by Associazione Culturale e di Ricerca NADA. They write:

The festival is focusing on creative potential of Computational Design: a viewpoint and a working hypothesis where computational generative strategies become a vital tool to connect the new potential of digital fabrication to an ever growing demand for mass customized design objects.

Other exhibition participants include Ammar Eloueini, Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz, Adrian Bowyer, Nervous System, MOS, Marc Fornes, Fluid Forms, and Susanne Stauch. There’s more information at the C.STEM website.

Between August 18th and 29th we will run 7 simultaneous workshops in open software and hardware for designers and artists at our studio… Themes will be related to either physical computing or computer vision. There are both basic and advanced workshops that vary in length between 2 and 3 days.

The complete information is available on their website.

I’m around during the first week to give a presentation about Processing and to start work on some secret Processing-related projects. Thanks to all of the organizers and to David Cuartielles for the invitation.