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!

Ben Fry and I did an interview about Processing with Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte for FLOSS Weekly. It’s archived at http://twit.tv/floss52.

Our Design | Media Arts undergraduates have pulled off another fantastic exhibition. The show runs January 8 – 29 in the New Wight Gallery at the Broad Arts Center, UCLA. The exhibition is bursting with work ranging from first-year drawing and color assignments to advanced typography, video, and interactive explorations.

They’ve put together a very nice two-day lecture series during the show. Imaginary Forces and National Forest are speaking starting at 5pm on January 20. Beautiful Decay, Left Field Labs, MFG Productions, and Grand Jete are speaking starting at 5pm on January 22.

Please come and join us for the exhibition and lectures.

Process 16 is on exhibition at the University of California, Irvine Beall Center from January 9 – March 14, 2009 as a part of the Scalable Relations exhibition:

Scalable Relations is a series of networked exhibitions that present media artworks by faculty of the UC Digital Arts Research Network (DARnet) across UC campuses from January 9 throughout March, 2009. The exhibition, curated by Christiane Paul (Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art), takes place at the Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine; the gallery@CalIT2 at UCSD; California NanoSystems Institute CN(S)I at UCLA; as well as Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at UCSB. Scalable Relations brings together works that explore digital media’s capability of representing a growing amount of data in constantly evolving relations. Addressing a range of issues, the projects in Scalable Relations illustrate the complexities and shifting contexts of today’s information society.

My colleagues Sheldon Brown, George Legrady and Angus Forbes, Rebeca Mendez, Greg Niemeyer, and Warren Sack also have works on display.

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.

Processing was featured in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune. Ben Fry snipped some relevant quotes on his site. The full article is online at the IHT.