daniel shiffman

ITP Spring Show 2009 from Winslow Porter on Vimeo.

ITP Show

It’s taken me a little while, but here’s a brief recap of what was quite possibly the most heart-warming and thrilling conference I will ever have the chance to attend — ART + CODE: a symposium on programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us.

First, a hearty thank you to Golan Levin who did a tremendous job planning and organizing the mind-bending experience. Some highlights:

Oxford Project Part III — Thanks to the ever ebullient Ira Greenberg and Miami University for sponsoring (and the Studio for Creative Inquiry @ CMU for giving us space), we were able to convene before the main festivities began to give Processing a push towards some number past 1.0. Stay tuned for exciting improvements in Processing’s video and OPENGL libraries as well as to the IDE itself.

Saturday was a day full of workshops. In the morning, I attempted to teach an entire semester of ICM in under three hours, followed by an afternoon mix of topics related to physics simulation and image processing.

Sunday was the day to end all days with the lineup of speakings including lead developers of the languages / environments: Alice, Pure Data, Scratch, Hackety Hack, Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, vvvv, ExtendScript, and openFrameworks. Some highlights within highlights here were Luke Dubois’ demo of “what is known in the biz as random atonal crap” and Sebastian Oschatz’s boy band metaphor for multi-screen setups (one that I really need to take a look at more closely as we develop “most pixels ever” at ITP.) Videos of all the Sunday talks will eventually be posted at vimeo/artandcode.

On Monday, I was lucky to have the chance before heading home to catch the work of Casey Reas and Marius Watz at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Of course, all of this was really just an excuse for a nice group photo.

This is long overdue, here are some photos and video from my class’ winter show on the IAC video wall. Six of the projects were made in Processing, three in openFrameworks, and three were pre-rendered video projects (synced using openFrameworks).

Big Screens ITP Show at IAC from shiffman on Vimeo.

As an addendum to the previous post, here’s an early draft excerpt from Chapter 7 on steering behaviors, more specifically a tutorial related to my new path following examples. Also an excuse to cover the dot product in more detail. All based on Craig Reynolds of course.

This semester, I’ve started working on expanding my nature of code tutorials into a book. My plan is to self-publish (looking into a few options) and have drafts available for download / purchase as early as this summer. I’ll also be publishing excerpts from the book as tutorials on processing.org (the first will be a PVector tutorial) and on this site as well.

sign up for e-mail updates about the book

Here is a PDF of the draft table of contents for those who are curious. Feedback is welcome!

I’ve added three new steering examples (based, of course, off of Craig Reynolds’ Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters) to the nature of code tutorials. Ultimately, it’s my goal to build out all of Reynolds’ algorithms into a Processing library (much like Open Steer), so stay tuned. . .

Path Following
Flow Field
Crowd Path Following

I hope to have a new tutorial about the use of the PVector dot product in the path following examples posted in the next day or two as well.

I recently returned from a great visit to Concordia University in Montreal where I gave two presentations about Processing. Thank you to Matt Soar and Jason Lewis for being such excellent hosts.

For more, check out the excellent work being created at Obx labs.

Two announcements.

I am incredibly honored and excited to be participating in the upcoming Art and Code symposium, organized by Golan Levin at Carnegie Mellon University.

Visit Art and Code

In addition, I’m finally working on a new tutorial page for the Nature of Code site. The tutorial will be about resolving collisions and I’m using the excellent book Mathematics and Physics for Programmers as a basis. I’ve posted the very first example, a simple implementation (using PVector) of two circles (equal mass) colliding. Note the collision is an idealized elastic collision. And the example isn’t terribly sophisticated and needs some improvements in order to work with more than two objects.

Reblogging from REAS: “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.”

Also, check out this wonderful blog by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg: poems for the first 100 days, a new poem every day of Obama’s first 100 days by a contemporary American poet.

http://100dayspoems.blogspot.com/

First, anyone in NYC, come and check out the ITP show this week!

In other news, there’s a nice write-up at Gizmodo about the Big Screens show at IAC. I should point out that three of the projects this year used openFrameworks (including “Caves of Wonder” by Matt Parker which was mistakenly attributed to Processing in the article). Six of the projects were indeed developed with Processing and three were pre-rendered videos. Here are some of the vimeo clips from Gizmodo. Hope to post more videos and photos soon. . .

Big Screens – Claptime by Vikram Tank from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Big Screens – White Sun by Mooshir Vahanvati from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Big Screens – Caves of Wonder by Matt Parker from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Big Screens – In the Shadows by Alejandro Abreu Theresa Ling from Gizmodo on Vimeo.