Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

Working in 3d in Processing is all well and good but does have it’s limits in terms of rendering. To get a better rendering of three dimensional forms created with Processing it’s possible to export them to a file that a 3d modeling program can read. From my experience, the exported file isn’t perfect, but with a little work it can be turned into a nice model. A Processing script generated a 3d grid based on sound, the three axes representing amplitude, frequency, and time. Using the DXF library, I exported the model.

This raw data is a little bulky and has a few issues. All the segments of the form were separate objects. After importing the script into Blender (a free 3d modeling and animation program) I selected all the objects, joined them, and then in edit mode removed doubles. This combines all the meshes if they are lined up. Then using the ‘make faces’ on auto will fill in all triangles and quads. The image above was also extruded to give it some form and has a subsurface modifier for a smoother look.

If you are interested in geometric fractals, Context Free Art is a very interesting program it play with. The interface consists of a code area on the right, and a rendering area on the left. The very simple script only contains a few commands, but through recursion can create fantastic fractals.

The script allows you to draw squares, triangles, and circles, and to transform them in a few different ways and color them. You can create custom rules which transform whichever rule they contain. By creating recursive functions like this just about any geometric fractal can be created. Although the program is very limited, I find it very interesting how much can be created only with transformations of three basic shapes. The program also has the ability to export both raster (pixel based) and vector images, which makes it a useful tool for creating shapes and textures, and renders the script live. If you would like to go further with fractal generation, I recommend Processing, but Context Free Art is so simple to learn it’s a fun tool to play around with.

Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is a free, collaborative, online encyclopedia. Anyone can edit any article, or add new articles. This might not sound like a great idea, but things are monitored and uncited facts are removed and dubious articles are clearly marked for revision. The system allows for the encyclopedia to grow constantly and to reflect not just information typically included in an encyclopedia, on historical and scholarly subjects. Wikipedia offers information on the most current topics in art, science, music, geography, news, politics, and anything else I’ve ever searched for. It’s easy to attack the site for being unreliable, but it is well monitored and undeniable useful.

As an artist, I find Wikipedia a fantastic subject to work with. I appreciate the site for what it is and working with it I have an excuse to peruse all sorts of information. When working with network visualization Wikipedia is very easy to glean data from. All pages are standardized and even include convenient HTML comments marking off sections of each page. Although this also makes it a very poor analog for the world wide web, which is far from standardized, it is a great starting place and simplifies a lot of tasks. In addition, since the entire site is under an open content license the data is free to use.

My most recent project WikiWeb is a live, interactive, visualization of the site. Another limb of this project will hopefully lead to a static map of the whole site. A few other small visualizations are on their way as well.

Rhizome.org is an online extension of The New Museum in New York. The museum focuses on new media including a variety of digital and interactive arts. Rhizome includes a massive collection of New Media Works from around the world. In addition they have a blog of new works and events. Rhizome provides a much needed place where new media art of any form can be exhibited in a professional setting and utilizes the format familiar to the artists they feature, as opposed to most museums, which are a few decades behind and have no idea or ability to feature works in new, developing media.

Recently WikiWeb was added to their ArtBase. Their online collection of works is worth taking a look at. It contains many interesting interactive works and features many prominent artists.

Quartz Composer is a Mac Application for visual programming. The program allows anyone to create interactive scripts which can be exported as a Quicktime movie or used as a screen saver. It allows for just about any input–mouse, audio, keyboard–although some some of these won’t work when run in some contexts. To make my critique brief: Quartz Composer is quite fast and powerful and the interface is very usable. Anyone with or without any programming knowledge could create something that looks nice if they play around with it long enough. Ultimately, however, it is very limited. Even if it may seem at first like it could do anything, if you are a creative soul you will find you can only realize your visions if they happen to be doable with one of the prefabricated filters or effects.

Read On »

At last Processing is no longer beta, with the release of version one. It’s not a whole lot different, although the new version comes with a brand new color scheme. I always did prefer cyan to red anyway. The mac version acts a little more like a Mac program should, a self contained applet without all the extra files. This does make using libraries slightly more work. Processing 1 seems to run much smoother over all, and the compiler has been upgraded. I recompiled WikiWeb and it’s running better. There is a more detailed list of changes on the Processing site.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment developed for artists and designers to quickly and easily develop programs for any application. The language is java based, fairly easy to learn, even for the non-programmer, which includes many functions to create dynamic graphics. The environment allows for easy debugging of scripts, testing, and finally exporting of your programs to web applets or to an application for any operating system. And best of all Processing is completely free to download and very well documented, with definitions and examples for every function.

Read On »