Lines That Stick To Your Cursor

, , — Rebecca Cottrell on July 4, 2009 at 1:31 pm

I’m playing with Processing.

At the same time, I am making my way through this lovely book by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, which is “a programming handbook for visual designers and artists”. It’s not just a pretty book (the book is very pretty); it’s a compelling philosophical collection of essays and practical tasks for visual designers-who-wanna-be-programmers. The chasm between code and art has never been so narrow.

Processing is definitely an art platform but if you can do maths that helps. People can do some very cool interactive stuff with it. Though it’s also used for making quick interactive prototypes (I want to see what mobile-design extraordinaire Bryan Rieger has been up to with it.)

I don’t expect to accomplish anything particulary grand with it; at least not yet—I’m having fun typing out the code and seeing what I can do, and picking up the syntax.

Oh, and here’s some lines that stick to your cursor.

Pretty cool, eh?

2 Comments

  1. I’ve always wondered what your experience with programming was in general, mostly out of curiosity as to where in the spectrum someone would be who’s gone through the academic system to come out as an interaction designer and what not. I assumed you were either very well versed or not at all (w/ pros and cons to both, don’t worry…haha)

    And forget about a chasm – I’ve read articles by programmers where the articles shift from the topic of elegance in the conceptual essence of their code to elegance in the concrete, aesthetic form. I’m always reminded of poetry when I look at codes in books, and I recently found – through some research – that software in the US is covered by both patent -and- copyright, and if it’s the latter it’s considered a literary work.

    And for the artists, I just wonder why LOGO and the automated drawing turtles you could hook up to computers to draw your LOGO programs never took off more.

    Crazy times we live in.

    Comment by Will — July 5, 2009 @ 7:06 am

  2. I am always embarrassed when I leave comments that rival the post length. haha

    Comment by Will — July 5, 2009 @ 7:06 am

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

© Rebecca Cottrell 2007–2010