| PROCESSING / Report

PROCESSING REPORT

Saturday 21 October 2006 10am

Here we go! The second workshop got started and ended before I had the time to post anything. Sorry for the delay, but it has been a quite intense workshop. This time we are located in a wonderfull space, the Mutti e Architetti studio. A really nice space, as many participants remarked and very comfortable. Maybe not in the first hour, as ailadi forgot to light up the heating, :-) but we got it quickly fixed.

Here you have a general view of the group of participants, following the introduction Walter is giving about the processing world. As it's not completely obvious as a program "thinks", we start with some software logic to be able to follow the next steps.

We are ready, we can open the downloaded program 8 as it is an open soure one) and we start with the first explanation of its possibilities. For each step an exercise. With two instructions we see some graphic on our screens. Quite basic still, thought i'm happy, i'm starting to enter the software logic...well it's a start!

Time rus fast and only the stomac stays quite reasonable and sceam for food! Everybody get up and of course start talking with the others, exchanging presentations, what one does, what the other..

As noemi wrote in the questionar the eterogenic background of participants is useful to understand which ones could be the different application of processing. That's nice as the programmer learn by the performer how it could be used for a visula installation, instead the musician offers his sound interpretation of it, and so on..

People start showing what they do: Sound Performance, Video with 3D renderings,..They wander if they could combine what they did in the past with processing.

Walter looks for some processing example for each question. Then we finally go eating.

Back after a light Kebab, and we go on with the explanation. We get to know that programming isn't that cold and formal as we were supposing. The program language reflects the interests and obsessions of the people who invented it. Processing, that was invented by Ben Fry and Casey Rease, has, inbetween many other features, a high sophisticated possibilities to deal with Fonts. This because of Casey passion for Typography.

The first day get to an end, for today we are done, some will go on working at home to make some tries with what they lernt, some will go out for aperitivo, some other like me will faint in the bed before midnight.

Second day!

Sorry, I haven't presented you our assistent Héctor yet!

Besides Walter explains Héctor checks everybody manages to get the exercises right. Noemi has gone further trying to do something more complicated, she is a programmer and can't escape being courious into what she can do with processing.

Héctor's nice stickered laptop.

A couple of photos of people entering the programming world.

It's nice to understand that we can code the same thing in many different ways. We have to choose the most suited to understand what we are doing. This is important if we need that other people do understand what we were doing throgh the programme code. It can also be that if we look at a programme we wrote some mounths earlier we do not remember what we wanted to do, so, if we write it in a senseable way, we can figure out what we did and go on working on it! An other advise we get for this pourpose is to always add comments.

Talking and talking..

I couldn't escape taking a picture of these so nice shoes.

So this is a short report of the workshop, i couldn't talk about all what we did, otherwise it would take two days to read it, but if anyone is willing to add some comments, he/she is very welcome.

Appointment to next week for the Arduino workshop.

Bye, ailadi.