Excitement. Anxiety. Anticipation.
These are the three prevelant emotions that I experienced when I started playing with Open Processing. My plan was to look through the submitted sketches as inspiration for things to do once we starting coding in class. However, a range of emotions began to overtake me as I started my browsing. First, the excitement is due to this being a return to this program for me. There were a few years in my undergrad when the majority of time spent outside of class was either snowboarding or spending time creating, albeit basic, programs in the desktop version of Processing. I thoroughly enjoyed my new found ability to create artistic visualization based on images, video, and data in general. The culmination of this programmatic experimentation was an application that took and input of the .XML file of a user’s iTunes library and outputted a visual representation of the individual’s taste in music. It picked up on the frequency of specific genres and then converted that frequency into the amplitude of a corresponding sin wave. These sin waves then danced on the screen while the user viewed their interests in a unique and, in my opinion, thought provoking way.
Second, anxiety is the emotion I felt second as I began to dig into some of the code for sketches I found interesting. At the beginning they were simple and I feel confident that I could, given some time and refreshing, imitate and expand upon. However, when I started to dig into more of the detailed sketches the appearance of physics and increasing numbers of classes being referred to in the code started to freak me out just a little bit! The integration of JavaScript was also a new concept for me and it will be interesting figuring out how to incorporate the abilities of that system into what I already know about Processing. I know that there are a lot of new concepts that I need to learn coupled with a multitude of old knowledge I need to refresh. However, this anxiety subsided and my next emotion began to take over.
Finally, I was overcome with anticipation because I’m finally in a place where I can focus all of my energy onto creating again, onto using programs like Open Processing to code artistic creations that I, and potential others, find appealing. This anticipation is what motivated me to dig through even more sketches on the website and to explore the code. After looking through several sketches I was back to the emotion of excitement! Ready to dig in with everyone on Tuesday night. I have included links to a couple of the more detailed and code-intensive sketches for reference. Interactive Particle Network. Noisy2. Pendulum Wave Effect. Volcanic Cascades.
My favorite sketch that I looked at while I was browsing was Color Smoke and I’ve linked to here just for quick reference and because the iframe embed is just plain frustrating 🙁 I just enjoy the soothing effect it has and the beauty that can be created with a few lines of code!
I would say after looking back at the time I spent going through the sketches that it was truly inspiring to see what other people are creating with this program! I have
always had a fascination with detailed geometric shapes and patterns and I hope to pull from that fascination in my sketches. Shapes like the Snub Cube have always been interesting and I believe that polygon art is very closely related to this fascination with geometry. It is a style that I would definily love to incorporate into some of my Processing sketches.
Also, I was listening to Soulection Radio while I was browsing and that always seems to be soothing and inspiring in itself.