v3ga » Processing

Processing Paris photos

v3ga — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:00:25 +0000

I animated a two-days Processing workshop in Paris @ La Fonderie de L’image.

We worked with the students on interactive pattern making, resulting in the creation of posters and wallpapers that were exposed then.

Thanks to all the participants, this was a fun and creative week-end. Cheers to Mark and David for making this happen.

Processing Paris 01

v3ga — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:22:32 +0000

Processing Paris is an initiative between la Fonderie de l’Image, Cefag Formations and OFFF Tracks, which will be organizing OFFF Paris this year. For this first session, two workshops and an exhibition of international artists will be set up.

Workshops will focus on creative programming through the use of Processing environment.
Participants will practice and experiment new ways of creating static and dynamic visuals by writing their own softwares and tools. Karsten Schmidt (aka Toxi) will teach a Master Class for experimented people (in english) while I will be teaching a beginners course (in French) alongside with Christian Delecluse.

————

Processing Paris est une initiative collaborative entre La Fonderie de l’Image, Cefag Formations et OFFF Tracks (organisateurs du festival OFFF à Paris). Au cours de l’année nous souhaitons organiser des événements qui porteront sur l’éducation, l’échange et la création Processing. Pour cette première édition nous avons organisé deux ateliers plus une exposition d’oeuvres internationales.

L’objectif de ces ateliers sera de familiariser les participants à la programmation avec Processing pour leur permettre d’expérimenter de nouvelles formes de création visuelles, de réaliser des prototypes/software et de produire des oeuvres visuelles statiques aussi bien qu’interactives/réactives. Deux ateliers sont proposés :

Un groupe pour débutants qui sera mené par Julien Gachadoat en français.
Un groupe ‘Master Class’ pour les plus expérimentés, mené par Karsten Schmidt en anglais.

Crea numerica

v3ga — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:12:21 +0000

I was invited to give a two days workshop on Processing and a conference about free and open source code-related software in the city of Beirut in Lebanon. This was part of the Crea Numerica event, which gathered several francophone artists during one week.
As usual, such events are appropriate to meet interesting people, and I had good times with Fred & Jean-Marie of SlidersLab. Also, I discovered “Le Temple des Montagnes”, a simple and yet beautiful installation by swiss artist Camille Scherrer.

Photo shot in the Bacchus temple in Baalbek.

Cool catz party

v3ga — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:49:49 +0000

I made the visuals for a cool catz & tuff wheelz gig @ 4sans in Bordeaux. Animations were controlled remotely from an iphone thanks to the beloved Mrmr.
Vimeo video here.

Buzzing around

v3ga — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:58:24 +0000

Gravity – Interactive installation @ Utopia, Bordeaux from 2Roqs on Vimeo.

I had the opportunity to teach several workshops, give a talk and show Gravity during the month of March.

La Chose Programmée, a workshop held @ BBB in Toulouse (February 23th to 26th), where code together with Bluetooth technologies on mobile phones were explored with Etienne Cliquet and some students of the Ecole des Beaux-arts de Toulouse.
Read a more detailed article on 2Roqs website.
Openframeworks workshop, held @ Craslab in Paris (February 28th to March 1st). By the way, version 006 was just released a few days ago and has now support for iPhone development. Check a tutorial on Memo’s website (more to come).
Slides about Openframeworks (pdf, french)
Code as a creative tool, a talk followed by a short Processing workshop given for the festival Siana in Evry (March 23rd). Yay, it was very cool to talk about the early Atari & Amiga demoscene in the end of the 80’s.
Scroll some more text about this on 2Roqs website.
Gravity was exhibited twice in Bordeaux (March 17th to 20th) . The first installation was shown for “la semaine de la langue française”, and it was set up in an old nunnery that is part of the Drac Aquitaine, a french government organization responsible for promoting cultural events.
The other one was set up as part of the E.motion electronic festival in Bordeaux. The animation was projected on the Utopia movie theater’s facade. This event was a huge success as the application received more than 1000 sms messages in roughly 3 hours!
Videos, photos on 2Roqs website.

New year 2009

v3ga — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:14:55 +0000

Built with Processing.

Processing workshop in Limerick (Ireland) @ Tweak festival

v3ga — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:26:18 +0000

I will animate a processing workshop with Sevenfive for the first edition of the Tweak festival, held in the Limerick school of Art and Design.
The workshop will deal with the creation of collaborative visuals and sounds, through the use of an osc server<->clients architecture coded in Processing, alongside with Ableton Live for sound effects tweaking.
Documents (code, photos, etc…) will be posted on this blog after the workshop.

BW Particles

v3ga — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:48:54 +0000

Simon released the source code of the program we assembled for the Web Flash Festival some weeks ago. Check it out.

cadavre exquis web flash festival from crazy snake on Vimeo.

Retrieving SMS messages from Processing on Mac

v3ga — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:50:47 +0000

>>> Download processing sketch <<<

Here is a sketch written in Processing that allows you to retrieve in real-time SMS messages from a phone. It uses a MySQL-driven database to store the messages, you’ll need to have one at your disposal (remote or local).

A convenient way to install such a database on your computer is to download and install MAMP, then it’ll be just a matter of drag’n'dropping a folder in your Applications folder, the easy and usual way on Mac.
The package comes also with phpMyAdmin, a popular web-based tool to manage MySQL databases from within your browser.

Softwares/hardwares needed to run this program (assuming you have Processing installed):

Mac computer with bluetooth enabled.
A mobile phone with bluetooth capabilities (and enabled).
Access to a MySQL server. Download and install MAMP if you want to run one on your computer.
Cocoa UltraSMS. This software uses bluetooth communication to connect to your phone, and SQL database to save the retrieved messages.
MySQL library for Processing by Florian Jenett. The page comes with description to install a MySQL server too.

Here are the few steps to make the program run :

1. Install MySQL and create a database called processingsms.
If you installed MAMP, use phpMyAdmin to perform this operation. This step can be skipped if you have already access to a server.

2. Download and install Cocoa UltraSMS.
Run it and click on the Setup button to modify some parameters. Also, choose your bluetooth-enabled mobile phone in the list.

Note that the screenshot parameters are important and may differ from your MySQL configuration. This paramaters will be used in the Processing sketch to connect to the database :

hostname + port. On a default MAMP installation, these are set to 127.0.0.1 and 8889.
database. The name of the database that was created in the previous step.
username + password. On a default MAMP installation these are both set to root.

3. Click on the Test button to check if UltraSMS can connect to the database. It will also ask you to create two tables (smsins and smsparts), click Ok. The Empty button will remove all the messages already saved.

4. Open Processing IDE, load the ProcessingSMS.pde sketch. In the config tab, change the values of the variables accordingly to your UltraSMS setup.

5. Click on the Start button of the UltraSMS application. If everything goes well, the status should switch to Connected.
6. Run the program, it should display in the console your sms messages that were inside your phone.
7. Tell a friend to send a message on the connected phone, it should be grabbed and saved in the database !

I recently used this configuration in two installations, one of them being the particles cloud that was shown during the Web Flash Festival.
One of the main drawback I had to face is that the UltraSMS application deconnected when messages were sent massively to the receiving phone. You have then to reconnect manually , which may not be a good thing if this system is to be used in standalone installation. UltraSMS source code is available and there may be a hack to force an automatic reconnection in such situations.
The mobile phone I used for the tests was a Sony Ericsson K600i.

The .zip file containing the Processing sketch also contains a php script to simulate the sending of a SMS into database, which is quite handy when you’re in debugging mode. MAMP is then the tool of choice as it also installs Apache which runs a localhost webserver and lets you execute php scripts.

Any feedback would be very much appreciated. If you have tips, mobile phones that worked / not worked with this configuration, projects using this stuff (or other type of configuration), that would be lovely to share. Thanks!

>>> Download processing sketch <<<

Back from the Flash Festival

v3ga — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:33:37 +0000

I spent an intense week-end in Paris where I perfomed a coding session with Processing (see my previous post). I had the pleasure to be associated with Simon Geilfus for the whole Sunday afternoon and we just had six hours to produce a program around the theme “Playable”, knowing that our production would be shown during the final ceremony on the evening (pressure, pressure!).
Fortunately we met the day before around a beer so that we had time to plan things a bit and talked on how we could possibly interpret that theme. We quickly agreed on the fact that it would be a good opportunity to let the audience participate and play with our application in some way.
We ended up re-using and re-mixing some code we had taken with us, and produced an animation which rendered 30000 black and white audio-reactive particles. Simon did a great job on this, by using a special technique with a pixel shader for individual particle drawing (cheers for showing me that :-).
People were then able to send SMS messages, and words were then dynamically assembled by picking up some of the particles and coloring them. All of their movements were controlled by some flocking behaviour. That was awesome, and I think people really liked it as we received almost 50 messages in 2 minutes…! We had very positive feedback, though a last-minute-we-didnot-let-run-the-application-enough-time bug prevented the application to display the whole set of received messages.

Links:

Photos by Quasimondo