I would like to defend my right to be stupid (and even sloppy). Without it I would be bereft artistic curiosity and more importantly, humility.

I gave me freedom to loosen up on myself.

As far as Toxi’s concern with processing user’s co-opting his work and making minor changes to pass off as their own, the course of natural selection will take care of that. Just like when I can along in Design School and the computer was new with graphical applications, there was all this concern that our jobs would be lost to admin assistants and hacks. For a while it was true that anyone who could turn on a computer and use a filter could present himself or herself as a “graphic designer”. Then when the market was saturated with the same schlock, the hacks began to lose their jobs (especially after internet bubble burst).

The same with processing, hacks like me will steal the existing stuff and mess around with it to learn. I hope to be able to get beyond being a total hack someday. But those with the know-how and the talent will always be ahead of us and setting new trends and bars for the rest of us to cross.

So I go back to my hacking for the mid-term project.

But this is not an uncommon story. We see it over and over again in every generation and every art movement.
That’s why we call them movements- because everybody starts to jump on a given bandwagon because it is the new, and therefore, hip thing.

Originality is a funny thing. I’m not sure whether it exists or not. You always see paralells in the evolution of ideas between different the different arts, philosophy, and now technology emerge around the same time. This suggests that maybe there is no such thing as original thought by an individual. We all influence one another as we look into the nature of the world around us and create representations of it for one another.

Cubism was fathered by Montparnasse, not by Picasso or Duchamp or any other individual. As a matter of fact, Picasso’s friends claim that the other artists in Montparnasse at the time hid their paintings from him when they went to the cafes. It was well known that Picasso could copy your style and do a much better job of it than you could yourself. But the movement itself would not likely have evolved in isolation. It took a community, a community of people who were seeing moving pictures and strobe photgraphy techniques for the first time and discussing its influence on the way humans see.

Toxi works in a free, open source environment, potentially even more rich with dialogue than Montparnasse because of the communication tools available to him. No doubt his predecessors hold the same kind of grudge against him. It is the dissonance engendered by the ego in an emerging age of open global communication and we will all whine about it soon enough if we don’t now.

The quest for immortality through art has always been relatively futile. At least one’s fame can be drawn out a little longer by cultivating a genuine curiosity in the work of and a continuing dialog those who come after him.

I have learned java, but never make it further when I learned GUI is a disaster for me. I got frustrated and gave up. Processing is the second programming language I know, and I like it. I had lots of fun without worrying about my sucking programming skill, and I know one day I will be a good programmer as long as I continue to use it.

I started learning programming with Java, so I can really appreciate the simplicity of Processing in comparison. Being able to draw a circle with, like 5 lines of code, is impressive. Relaxing the conventional programming constraints does a lot for freeing up the creative spirit.

As far as learning programming concepts in Processing? Hmm. The concept of object orientation is a lot easier to grasp when you can see the objects bouncing around your screen, but I’m not so sure that Processing is the ideal environment in which to really learn OO programming. Due to the simplicity of procedural programming in Processing, it’s alluring to take the least-resistance path. In pure Java there’s so much overhead to do anything that you really see the value of building reusable structures so that you don’t have to repeat yourself.

Any large-scale project, though, gets out of hand pretty quickly if you don’t take advantage of good design principles. In theory, this should mean that Processing programmers will ramp up their code to take advantage of more effective programming techniques as they tackle more ambitious projects. But maybe it’s the case instead that the initial ease of development in Processing is a deterrent to anyone who tries to go further, so they don’t.

1. His definition of art is pretty far of the mark.

Some of my favorite artists (Ryan McGinley, who I remember being quoted once as saying he didn’t know anything about cameras. Or how about Chris Johanson?.. I could really go on forever here.) don’t really concern themselves with being masters of their medium (at least not in the way Toxi is getting at). Now, in terms of insight into some facet of the universe or the human condition, they’ve changed my life and the way I look at things. Most people don’t like those artists, or don’t get it, or don’t care. Fine, but that doesn’t make their work any less important to me. Their naive approach, in most cases, has helped their work be a very personal and pure expression of their take on things. They become masters of their medium becuase they develop some unique relationship with it. The best artists break the rules. Maybe some derivitive aesthetic emerges as a result, but what does that matter? How many paint-splatter canvases came to be because Pollack used oil paint wrong?

2. The tool always informs the work, you can’t separate them.

Oil paintings look like oil paintings. Photographs look like photographs. Cave paintings look like cave paintings. Processing was developed as a teaching tool and computational sketch-pad. How limiting are those charcoal sketch-pads that art students carry around? Do they basically pre-determine what the work will look like? Yep. The limitations are why teachers use them. Should those students be taught using a different medium? Maybe. Whatever gets them exited and interested is probably the best. For that reason alone Processing is a fantastically successful teaching tool. Should those students move beyond charcoal? Sure. But they won’t if they’re not exited and inspired.

3. Processing does help bridge the gap between traditional artists and computational media.

I used to make a living drawing pictures. Then I became a “designer”. Then I got into Flash and Actionscript (because I hated the messiness of html). Then I discovered processing. All of the sudden, I found myself writing “printmaking software”. Next thing I new I was living on the other side of the country, taking out giant student loans, and enrolling in BOTH of Dan Shiffman’s classes. I’m not saying that this is all because of Processing, but I don’t know… Would I have decided against SVA and gone with ITP if I hadn’t already wet my appetite on the seemingly limitless possibilities of computational media? Whatever. The point is that I’m now learning OOP principles. TOXI already understood them.

I don’t spend much time paying attention to the work that the “Processing Community” is creating. So I’m basically indifferent to the “Processing Aesthetic”. If I see work that interests me, I look at it and it enriches my life. I don’t care if the artist knew how to stretch his canvas correctly or organized her code using a time-honored design pattern.

I don’t know if you guys know but actionscript was really an loose-typed language when it was 1.0. You didn’t have any data-type strictness, you could basically convert everything to everything and could find your way procedurally with the advantage of the IDE as well. This was bringing some advantages to the ‘newbie coders’ as they could find their way out and get what they were aiming for without touching the hardcore concepts of programming. (I must open a bracket to say Flash’s IDE had its weird and difficult aspects as well) Following different Flash mailing lists, I learned that from a programmer’s perspective that world was bad, actionscript was not even a programming language(as it was counted as scripting language like JS) , and if you had a desire to pursue a career in programming and still in need of using flash you should stick using it in a more OOP sense. That was the first time I learned the term OOP. Out of my curiosity I digged it and came up with documents how to apply OOP to actionscript (mostly from Colin Moock) and how I should start to be writing with this approach. The OOP was good because it would allow you to extend your code easily and you could work on it with different colleagues, and the most important of all was it was reusable as opposed to Flash’s nature of spreaded and unmaintable coding. I followed different tutorials, read workshop notes, did the exercises repeatingly to understand and grasp the concept. Could I able to apply it to my own projects? Not really! Most of the time, it was an overkill for the project. They were one man strictly deadlined projects. It was just taking too much time to convert my way of thinking towards that. So OOP stayed as a passion for me. Then time had changed, they released AS2.0 to make it more stricted language so bigger projects could be applied with OOP and they released different books on using design patterns on Flash and I guess they were trying to pull more Java and alike programmers to ‘Flash’ area.

Reading Toxi’s blog I sensed some parallel paths between Flash’s early days and processing in a sense that what you could achieve with it and how it could be improved. I think the main problem stays as the profile of the people that are learning processing. If you’ll pursue a career in computational art, it is there with its glory, there are lots of examples that you can examine the code, it is a great exercise for everyone who wants to improve their coding styles, you can stretch, chew, skew, it is all there. It is clean, simple and open source. You can get a good grasp of what is going on within that source. You can use processing as an introduction and later jumping wagon or maybe back and forth with the other tools which could be more appropriate in terms of usability if you want to go merely in computational arts. So I totally agree with learning tool concept of processing here. But in another perspective, I strongly believe that if you are teaching a student introduction programming, it should just go parallel to OOP as well. Transforming to OOP is not easy if you have spent too much time with procedural style. This discussion is kind of black hole though, I feel myself off-topic as well