Its Friday, and I told myself I would get some of my processing sketches up on the blog earlier this week.   This sketch is a study I was doing on fractal attractors.   A large portion of this code is taken directly from the work of David Bollinger and his FungiScrawl Processing work.   I found playing with this sketch to be very mesmerizing, and I slowly started to tweak David’s code to make subtle artistic changes in how the attractors were rendering.   

For those of you Action Script junkies, reading the source code of Processing should be fairly easy, as it is Java.   One of the coolest things about this code is that David is dumping everything into an off-screen pixel-buffer and performing his own anti-aliasing and via a 4 pass sub-sampling algorithm.    So that might sound really sophisticated and complicated, but the code is actually very easy to read and was very approachable.    Some of what I have learned here I suspect will make its way into the guts of Degrafa at some point.

Early this week, quite by coincidence, Juan at scalenine showed me this by Matt Kenefick, which is almost exactly like what I have done here, but with Flex and AIR… way cool Matt!

I have several other features in this sketch (application in Processing parlance) that I was exploring, like being able to record certain gestures and then paste them in later, as well as other neat ways to manipulate the attractor code for different visual effects.

In doing various experiments with Processing, I have really found that it has been immensely helpful to see the source code of others.  Since I consider Processing more for artwork/play, than business, I see algorithms as just different tools to accomplish certain artistic goals.   It is really amazing when you can combine different pieces of code from different sources to achieve really interesting and amazing results.

So like the work I have done with Adobe Flex I am releasing some of my experiments for others to see/use. But unlike my work in Flex, I am not making too much effort to “clean” up the source code, so please view source at your own peril, as lots of stuff is just hacked together in a very brittle fashion.

So have at it and enjoy.

Here are a couple of sketches I was playing with today that were derivatives of the Fireworks subsystem (okay lets be honest, the subsystem is less than 100 lines of code)

This is my first attempt at creating something in Processing which I started to work with a few days ago.  Originally my goal was to create a fireworks show that resembled what I saw this 4th of July on the Mall in Washington DC, with my wife, two boys, and my sisters family.  I had fond memories of that trip and was hoping to re-create it in some artwork.  I am not sure this qualifies as artwork, but when my three year old came into my office, saw this running and instantly exclaimed “Fireworks Daddy!  Auntie Kim!” I knew I had reached a modicum of success.

I recently discovered Processing, and I am still in awe of what can be created with it.   For those of you not familiar with Processing, it is a c syntax (pretty much java) language created at MIT’s multi-media center designed to be used by artists and non-programmers to create visual/animated/physical works of art.   The primer written by two of Processing’s creators walks a person with no prior programming experience through learning to program.