Programming Art

Been a bit quiet around here, eh?

As I mentioned in my New Year’s post, I’ve been kind of taking a break lately. Haven’t really been doing much of anything to write about to be honest. Waiting for inspiration to hit me.

Well, it’s starting to hit. A few weeks ago, I talked to Shawn Pucknell about speaking at FiTC Toronto. So I needed to come up with a subject to talk about. Up to now, I’ve almost always done a brand new talk for every conference I’ve spoken at. Really, the only exceptions are when the organizers explicitly ask me to do a specific talk. But it seems that most speakers are doing the same talk at multiple events these days. Many do the same talk for a year, or a good part of thereof, at every conference they speak at.

I used to be opposed to this idea. I felt like it was lazy. For sure, coming up with a brand new talk and all the slides and examples that go with that, for every conference, sure is a lot more work. But I was talking to a few speakers late last year (specifically Grant and Mario while in Tokyo in November) and started to get a new viewpoint on the subject. These guys are anything but lazy about their presentations. Even though they are doing the same basic talk each time, they are constantly revising and tweaking it based on audience reaction and feedback, pacing, personal experience, new data, etc. Doing the same presentation more than once allows you to get better and better at that presentation. One part didn’t go so well? Drop it or change it? Went too long in one section? Figure out how to shorten it. Randomly run across some new graphic or example that is perfect for the subject? Squeeze it in there for next time.

On the other hand, when you do a new talk each time, you get one shot to make it good, and the next time, you’re onto something new and get one shot at that.

There’s also audience logistics that come into play. Again, I used to think that doing the same talk multiple times would be boring for the audience. But not everyone goes to every conference. If I do a talk in Brighton next year and that’s the only place I do it, there are a lot of people who might be very interested in it, but don’t happen to be at that conference, and will never hear it. And as for those people who seem to be at every conference, well, once they’ve seen your talk, they are free for the rest of the year to check out other speakers during your time slots. I know there have been plenty of times for me when there were two or more presentations going on in the same slot that I really wanted to see. I would be unhappy thinking that when I choose to miss one that I was really interested in, that’s the last shot I’ll ever get to see that particular talk.

So with that said, allow me to introduce my talk for 2010, “Programming Art”.

As you may know, in July 2008 I started a site called Art From Code. Algorithmic and generative art has, since I first started programming, been one of my biggest passions. In the old BIT-101 lab, I called them “experiments” but they were really quick and dirty interactive art pieces. Art From Code was an attempt to continue some of that same spirit, but with more focus on static images and less on the code behind them. I know that not providing the code for the pieces, and not making them interactive was a huge negative in many people’s eyes, but for me it was somehow very liberating and opened up my creative flood gates for a good six months. Then I got hooked on iPhone programming, and … well that’s another story.

So, while I was trying to figure out what to do next in my extracurricular programming life, one of the options was diving back into art. Another was to do more with games. I find game programming very fascinating. It has many of the same creative aspects as programming art, but in the end, I tend to get much more bogged down into the details of architecture and story line and level creation, and before long even the most exciting game idea becomes a chore to finish. With art it’s always fresh. Short iteration times and when you just publish the result, no bug reports!

Anyway, I decided I wanted to do more generative art again, but didn’t want to limit myself to just ActionScript and Flash. There were a lot of different tools and frameworks that I knew about and had dabbled with, that I thought would be fun to eventually try out more in depth. Stuff like Processing and Open Frameworks, but also lesser known stuff like Context Free Art, Structure Synth, Nodebox, and Toolbox, among others. I figured, what better time to dig into them but now, when I had nothing else particular going on anyway? And if I based my 2010 talk on them, that would keep me focused on them for quite a while. Enough to get to know each one really, really well by the end of the year. And so, that’s what my Programming Art talk will be about. Here’s the blurb:

As soon as computers had visual displays or printouts, people were using them to create art. In this presentation we’ll take a short look at the history of computer generated art, and a hands-on walk through of several of the available programs and languages used for that purpose today, including Flash, Processing, Structure Synth, NodeBox, Context Free, Open Frameworks, and maybe others.

I’ll be debuting the talk at FiTC Toronto in April, most likely doing it at Multi-Mania in Belgium in May, and then again at FlashBelt in Minneapolis in June. Those are the only conferences I’ve yet committed to speaking at in 2010. If I’m not totally bored with the talk, I don’t get rotten fruit thrown at me, and I get invited to speak anywhere else after that, I’ll probably do it a few more times.

Out of the talks I’ve given, one of my own personal favorites was my Art From Code talk at FiTC Amsterdam just about a year ago. I definitely plan to incorporate certain parts of that talk into Programming Art, before exploring the different tools.

I think it’s going to be a fun year!