All students should have the opportunity to be creative with code
This is a useful initiative, despite its narrow focus on engineering and science. It would be great to see the companion film which profiles creative arts and design professionals who regularly use programming as part of their practice/work.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Nina Wenhart's blog on the prehysteries of new media
"this blog is nina wenhart's collection of resources on the various histories of new media art. it consists mainly of non or very little edited material i found flaneuring on the net, sometimes with my own annotations and comments, sometimes it's also textparts i retyped from books that are out of print.
it is also meant to be an additional resource of information and recommended reading for my students of the prehystories of new media class that i teach at the school of the art institute of chicago in fall 2008.
the focus is on the time period from the beginning of the 20th century up to today."
(Nina Wenhart, 26/06/2008)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Drawing with Code: Works from the Anne and Michael Spalter Collection
29 January to 24 April 2011, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA.
"Drawing with Code brings together a selection of computer-generated art by the form's earliest and most important practitioners from the 1950s to today. The Providence-based collection of Anne and Michael Spalter is one of the largest and most important of its kind in the U.S. and shines a new light onto a darkened corner of the art historical record.
In our current digital environment when just about everyone holds the processing power of a full computer in their pocket, it is difficult to remember a time when computer technology was not involved in every aspect of our lives. In the arts-visual, cinematic, musical, dance, and theater-the computer has become not only an accepted, but in many cases, an intrinsic tool for artistic expression. The artists featured in Drawing with Code emerged in the early computer-era when the technology was rudimentary by current standards and its capabilities rarely extended beyond the world of computation. Merging their interests in art and coding, these practitioners came to be known as 'Algorists,' artists who employed original algorithms to create images. In addition to works on paper, Drawing with Code presents the work of two filmmakers, Lillian Schwartz and Stan VanDerBeek, who were brought into Bell Labs Research by Kenneth Knowlton to make some of the first computer art animations. These six animations were collaborations using Knowlton's BEFLIX (Bell Flicks) programming language for bitmap computer-produced movies.
The artists in Drawing with Code represent some of the earliest innovations in computer-generated art from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, pioneering a new form of collaboration between technology and art that pushed the boundaries of both.
Featured artists: Yoshiyuki Abe, Manuel Barbadillo, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Desmond Paul Henry, Sven Höglund / Bror Wikstörm, Sture Johannessen, G. F. Kammerer-Luka / Jean-Baptist Kempf, Hiroshi Kawano, Kenneth Knowlton, Ben F. Laposky, Manfred Mohr, Vera Molnar, Frieder Nake, George Nees, Lillian F. Schwartz, Stan VanDerBeek, Roman Verotsko, Mark Wilson, and Edward Zajac.
This exhibition is organized by guest curator George Fifield, Director, Boston Cyberarts Inc. and is part of the 2011 Boston Cyberarts Festival."
(deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2011)
Fig.1 Ben Laposky (1954–1956). 'Electronic Abstraction 4', oscilliscope, high speed film, photo paper, 16 1/2 inches x 13 inches, Collection of Anne and Michael Spalter.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Reinventing the wheel: Google announces their new programming language called 'Go'
"Go is a new programming language from Google that aims for performance that is nearly comparable to C, but with more expressive syntax and faster compilation....
Despite the large amount of enthusiasm for language design, modern mainstream programming languages don't fall far from the C tree. The best that Microsoft, Sun, and Apple have to offer are just variations on that theme, with the addition of predictable object models and conveniences like garbage collection. The slim minority of language geeks who have rebelled against bracist tyranny and stumbled over to innovative languages like Haskell and Erlang are doomed to toil in relative obscurity."
(Ryan Paul, 10 November 2009, Ars Technica)
[It's hard to dismiss the feeling that there is nothing special in Google's latest announcement about its new programming language called 'Go'. After all isn't this what manufacturers do - they produce products and develop assets. In this case the product is a language and the asset is the capacity to exert greater control over the way that users use the Internet. So if Google were really committed to creating a faster open source language why don't they contribute their substantial expertise to supporting an existing initiative. One that already has a substantial user-base and support.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Processing: a software sketchbook
"Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an open-source alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.
Processing presents an alternative to Flash and Director for creating interactive content. While both of these tools are propriety and create propriety file-types, Processing is open-source and allows users to create open-source productions. The tool is written in Java and generates Java Applets as its output."
(Ben Fry and Casey Reas)
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
