Duncan Marsh

Section One: The work I did for my project.

The goal of my project was to familiarize my self with a wide array of techniques for creating animations using the processing language. Before this program I had very little experience with the processing programing language. I Spent much of the quarter familiarizing myself with the language by completing a processing.org tutorial series on Lynda and reading the following books..

  •  Processing: a Programing Handbook for Visual Designers,  by Casey Reas and Ben Fry
  • Generative Design, by Hartmut Bohnaker, Benedikt Gorg, Julia Laub, and Claudious Lazzeroni
  • Form and Code, by Casey Reas andChandler McWilliams
  • Generative Art a piratical guide using processing, by Matt Pearson

These Books Provided me with the skills to manipulate color, shapes, images, videos, shaders, and the camera frame. I worked through almost all of the exercises an created many interesting small animations from them. For my final project I created a more elaborate sketch that was composed of 10 separate animations. The animations were biased off an artist statement that I wrote called Chaos and Structure. These animations used a few processing library and several of my own classes. I recorded the animation by exporting each frame of a run through of the animation as a tiff file. Then I used adobe aftereffects to render them together as an animation. I composed the audio for the animation using a programing language called Supercollider and a software called Ableton Live.  I then loaded two different renders of the project animation onto vimeo.

Section Two: What I learned

Much of what I learned this quarter is simply technical skills for creating art in processing. I learned to implement things in multiple ways in order for different effects. For example In processing you can choose to manipulate color with RGB values or HSB values. RGB works with 8 bit values, were HSB uses radians (360 degrees). I mostly used RGB because it is the default color mode. But when I tried to implement a color wheel it was more efficient to use the HSB colormode because I was using trigonometry functions that produced degrees from 0-360. I leaned about the pros and cons of different image formats. Many formats are more compressed but do not allow allow you to use alpha or transparency. I don’t intend to tell you each part of the language that I learned to implement. I guess I learned two kinds of things, first a bit of history of computers and art, and second how to conceive my own art projects and then implement them. By the end of a quarter I fell that I had a pretty good understanding of why artist have generally been interested in programing their art in the past, and how I could use processing to literally implement any 2D idea I have. At the beginning of the quarter I was not sure weather or not I was going to ever be able to take my ideas from concept to source code. However when week 8 rolled around I had the feeling that I could code anything my mind could think of, as long as I had the time to sit down an write it out.

Section Three: Slides

I did not use slide for my presentation, I only used the websites for some of the book I read and my source code on github.

Books:

Source code:

Videos: