Processing and the power of simplicity

One of the goals on my list for 2010 is learning my way around Processing, which is an open source programming language that was designed to be a kind of electronic sketchbook for artists and designers and allow you to program interactive animations, model and visualize data, and more.

I’ve run across some really neat things that people have done with it, and I’m rather fascinated. It looks like it can do some pretty powerful (and attractive!) data crunching:

Flickr tag visualization by Smilehyun

Perhaps more inspiring for those of us who are dipping our toes in for the first time, however, is the ability to do some really interesting things with it using very short programs.

Miniature IV: White flower by Algirdas Rascius

Other than that elegant Flickr tag visualization up there, these images all come from the OpenProcessing Tiny Sketch pool – a collection limited to programs that weigh in at no more than 200 characters!

Last fall, OpenProcessing paired up with Rhizome, an organization that works to promote art works that engage technology, for a Tiny Sketch contest. The winner was a rather zen little game called Driving Through Iceland, by dotlassie.

Image from Driving Through Iceland

More Tiny Sketches can be found either at the closed archive of contest submissions or this open collection of sketches that meet the 200 character limit. I’ve been pretty amazed by the sorts of things people have pulled off within that limitation.

Sierpinski 2001 by Martin Schneider

Today I took the first step and downloaded the Processing software. Hopefully before too long I’ll be able to report back with  some examples from my experimentation.

Interested in learning a bit of Processing yourself? There are lots of resources out there – these lists of books and tutorials seem like good starting points.

Made with "A Slow Walk" by Leonardo Solaas