Creative coding translates the world of computers and code to everyday experience.
They're not setting out to solve a problem. They're setting out to express themselves. And
there is this really active, energetic community of people who make libraries, who write
tutorials, who teach with it. You can write words, you can do photography, you
can dance. Why not also write code?
If you're gonna program in C++ or you're doing stuff for the web in javascript,
you've gotta kind of piece together a lot of different elements and processing
will just let you get started on day one immediately. There isn't this need for
formal computer science rigor where you have to understand how every little
bit of code line works. It's fine to just try to
learn about how things work through doing.
I think for the most part it's used for computational design.
For a lot of visual artists and designers who want to create something visual but
don't want to make it manually, which could mean they don't want to draw it, it's something that
needs to be generated by an algorithm or a process;
that's something you can do with processing.
People do so much stuff with it. They use processing to put content on a hundred-twenty
foot wide video wall. People use it to make prints, physical things. It's used to make clothing.
You can make data visualizations with it. This is a starting point and it
is a conversation and it is a way of introducing this
realization that the computer isn't just a tool that has a
set of possibilities that you have been given. As systems and systems get more and
more closed, the
more that we can actually understand how to write our own software. That is really
a way one can express themselves and sort of break the bounds and limitations of what larger
institutions and corporations have made available to us to do on our computers. And so it can really
open one's eyes to things that you weren't aware of.
We started developing a couple projects way back in the mid two-thousands. One turned
into
the iTunes visualizer for Apple. We took all the code that was created,
refactored it and started the base layer of what later grew into Cinder.
Cinder is
a library of code
written in C++ that allows creative people to not have to do the
boring stuff and
focus actually on creativity and making the art side of things.
We really focus on high-level professional people who
are doing this for their job.
Cinder's been used in a lot of big scale and small scale projects. For example,
the Nike fuel band wall
was done in Cinder. That was at South by Southwest.
Mill produced something called Mill Touch where you could
navigate through their portfolio. You could scrub video with your hands.
Cinder is open source for a few reasons. One of which is that my company,
Barbarian Group, benefits greatly from other open source projects. And so there's
this desire and need to give back. Another reason for it to be open source
is that we benefit greatly from other users who help write the library and
grow the library
to where it needs to be. You know, some people write, some people paint. There are
some people who can basically think in visual code
and do some of the most beautiful things you've ever seen.
openFrameworks is a really powerful environment for creative coding. it's
borrowing from
libraries developed by a community. We decided to use openFrameworks because it enables
us to kind of explore these new possibilities. Both of us coming from a video
background, we're really interested in using the kinect as a camera and exploring
its potential for new forms of cinema. So that was the birth of the RGBD
toolkit. We're working with traditional DSLR video cameras and combining that
with the
kinect that perceives the world in three dimensions. What is the aesthetic of right now?
I think a lot of people are sort of seeing themselves as avatars, being represented by digital
systems, kind of living in digital worlds.
And, for me, it's really interesting conceptually for us to kind of
create a way for people to look at themselves through these lenses. Now we're
really interested in bringing this into a different domain, letting people experience
that footage real time so that you're engaging with the content. It's not
necessarily the future of cinema but it's a future. We didn't feel that
we were capable of exploring that ourselves and so we decided use openFrameworks
because it's based on the philosophy of sharing.
They create their artwork and then also give back the things that they learned
and the new tools they created so that other artists can use that. Creative
coding is really distinct from previous art movements in the sense that they
are all sharing
the bits and pieces that underlie these artworks that they produce. Extending
from that philosophy the toolkit then, we release that software open-source to
present it as something that filmmakers could explore and try new things with it.
I think that we're seeing the emergence of a new kind of creativity,
one that's highly interconnected and necessarily so.
What the future is is kind of up to the community.
It's up to the people who choose to volunteer, who make libraries. Now we actually
have companies coming to the openFrameworks community before they release a product saying
"Surprise us with this. Let us know what you think we want to do with this."
It shows how artists using technology in new ways can actually influence future
commercial products.
And I think the community is really supportive but also competitive at the same time so it's pushing everything forward.