For the first time, we’re selling Processing t-shirts. Profits will fund Processing development. We’ve partnered with Wire & Twine to make this happen. The shirts are hand screened in Oxford, OH, the home of the Processing 1.0 launch in November 2008. The shirts are available for pre-order on a navy American Apparel 100% cotton. Order by November 30th to get your shirt by December 25th. Shirts will begin production on November 30th and ship no later than December 14th.

We have two styles: the BEAUTY, and the BEAST. The BEAUTY shirt features a network image created with the code written for the Processing web header and the cover of the Reas/Fry book. The setup() and draw() functions from this code appears on The BEAST tee. The BEAST shirt features a diagram of the iconic Processing Development Environment and a piece of the code used to create The BEAUTY tee.

I’m exhibiting The Protean Image Machine 2 in the Collider exhibition in the Emily Davis Gallery at the Meyers School of Art, University of Akron. The project plays with the mutable nature of software. Participants modify software by filling out programming cards that are inserted into The Protean Image Machine. The Machine reads the cards and makes alterations to the software as it’s projected onto the wall. The emphasis of this action is on the relationship between the visitors choices and the resulting changes to the software.

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).

I realized yesterday that the Design By Numbers (DBN) programming environment created by John Maeda is now ten years old. It was released officially some time in 1999, along with its book companion published by MIT Press. This environment came just a little too late to teach me the basics of programming (I had started the year before with C) but I had the pleasure to work with it frequently and the privilege to teach a handful of workshops with it.

For myself and Ben Fry, DBN was the catalyst for Processing. Here’s an except from an essay we wrote in 2008:

Released by John Maeda in 1999, Design By Numbers (DBN) had the most direct impact on Processing. (In fact, it’s fair to say that there would be no Processing without DBN.) This minimalist language was created to be accessible to designers and artists and it works very well to introduce ideas of programming to that audience. Two other innovative ideas were integrated in DBN. First, the programming environment could be embedded into a web page so that it could be access for free, by anyone with a Web connection. Second, a web-based courseware application was integrated into the software to allow students to upload their assignments to a server where the public could see their work and look at their source code.

Processing’s emphasis on teaching came from our experience working with Prof. Maeda on DBN. We were so impressed with how quickly a beginner could start writing programs. Initially, we were interested in melding the idea of “sketching” in code with the pedagogical aspect of DBN. While working on DBN, Ben developed several experimental versions that included other programming languages (Python and Scheme) and drawing features (color, changing the window size, magnification, movie recording, and even OpenGL support), but it was clear that these did not make sense for the DBN project because they interfered with Maeda’s intention of a simplified programming language and environment.

Because it was written for the network, it can still be used today by simply visiting the URL. This makes it simple to test drive. First, glance at the brief introduction, then check it out.

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.)

Congratulations to the UCLA Design Media Arts class of 2009. For the second and final year, I experienced the pleasure of reading the names (and terror of mispronunciation.)

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.