Recently, I was interviewed by a good friend Tim Stutts about OpenProcessing, its origins, collaboration with Rhizome on the Tiny Sketch competition and its future. Below is a first couple of paragraphs; read the full article on Rhizome’s site:
Interview with Sinan Ascioglu: OpenProcessing Architect
OpenProcessing.org is a site that has built a community around sharing visual coding examples created in Processing. As user number 36, I had the unique privilege of watching the idea take shape, while in a thesis group with Sinan at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. During it’s first two years of activity, the site has grown to host thousands of user-generated sketches and subsequent conversations between artists / programmers, teachers, and students from around the world. Sinan and I escaped the snow recently at a café outside Washington Square Park to discuss OpenProcessing’s origins, Rhizome’s collaboration with OpenProcessing in the Tiny Sketch competition, and what we can expect for the future. – Tim Stutts
Tim: How did you first come up with the idea for OpenProcessing?
Sinan: I guess the first thing to talk about is OpenVisuals, which was my Master’s thesis project at ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University). I was reading Edward Tufte’s books at the time, and I became very interested in data visualization. In the meantime …. read more on Rhizome
This great tool allows you to see the source code of a sketch in a single page, using whether raw text, geshi or syntax highlighter formats. You can also generate the source code as a PDF file from this tool! Emoc also made it easy to use this tool through its URL: just add the visualID of the sketch to the end of the url, as in http://emoc.org/opcode/2292 or http://emoc.org/opcode/2292pdf. Check it out!
Rhizome just announced the winner of the Tiny Sketch competition, an open challenge to artists and programmers to create the most compelling creative work possible with the programming language Processing using 200 characters or less. The submission and voting phases are over and we are proud to announce that the winning sketch, as determined by Rhizome’s members, is Driving through Iceland by dotlassie.
As OpenProcessing and Rhizome, we would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in Tiny Sketch — it was a real success and we couldn’t have pulled it off without your support. The collection will be on permanent display in two locations; it will exist as a closed archive containing all of the entries that were submitted to the original contest in Rhizome’s ArtBase, and as an open collection at OpenProcessing where people can continue to submit sketches that follow the Tiny Sketch rules. I will open the collection for new submissions, to be collected under Tiny Sketch concept as soon as possible (once I organize all the sketches submitted for the competition).
Phew! What an awesome experience this was! Tiny Sketch competition that is produced in collaboration with Rhizome.org and OpenProcessing is now closed for submissions, and the voting begun at the Rhizome website for Rhizome members! If you are not already a member of Rhizome, now it is a great opportunity to be one; then as a Rhizome member, you can use Rhizome’s voting pages to vote the best Tiny Sketches!
Remember that your Rhizome membership contributions are going to support this non-profit foundation that is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Also, all the sketches submitted will be archived and exhibited in Rhizome Artbase.
Rhizome and OpenProcessing brings you a very interesting challenge to win $200?
Can you make a cool Processing sketch under 200 characters?
Recently, we "the creatives" started thinking how we can make interesting stuff out of Twitter’s famous 140 characters: some of us started Twitter Opera, some others tweeted from Mars, some babies kick-tweeted from womb, even plants started to tweet when they needed water. As challenge-loving Processing users, we thought that would have been interesting to see if we could code tweet-size sketches. These guys were already playing around with that idea, well, before you know it, Tiny Sketch Competition was born!
After some thoughts, we thought 140 would fall short for your limitless creative horizons, so keeping the limit at 200, we are inviting you to warp-speed your brain cells to see how you can fit that cool sketch in 200 characters.
Do you have some short sketches that you left aside? You think you are a master of find/replace feature? Can you find hacks to shorten some if/else statements? Show us!
I’ve just implemented Gravatar support in OpenProcessing: Now you will be able to set your own profile picture, or simply use what you already have in Gravatar. Gravatar provides a central resource for profile images that can be used in different website frameworks including WordPress, Movabletype, Drupal.
If you don’t have any profile picture set up with your email at Gravatar.com yet, upload one now! Once you update your profile in Gravatar, your profile image will automatically be updated on OpenProcessing, as well as other websites that uses Gravatar.
Also on another note: Golan Levin, a great individual and educator within the Processing community gave a very inspirational performance/speech on TED. In his 2004 performance, he used the application that he wrote, which translated gestural drawings into very interesting loops of music. Please check out this video from 2004 for some high-fuel inspiration for your own projects. Below is his recent talk from February 2009, with great examples of interactive art:
I recently received an email from a user who would like to use some sketches in a gallery space, on how to give attribution to the owners of these works. It made me realize that it is not necessarily clear how to do this on the website, and according to Creative Commons, anyone should attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. As OpenProcessing being the licensor in this case, I would like to provide such information in the footer/every sketch page, I thought of this text to be used for attribution:
%Title% by %fullname%, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
Work: http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=%1234%
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Of course, because the license is share-alike, any alteration, transformation, or build upon this work should be distributed only under the same, similar or a compatible license.
Please help me to refine this text by commenting on this post, if you think any additions, updates necessary. I will put a similar text to the website as soon as possible, and I will update it per your feedback/discussion under this post. Thank you, again..
Yes, I am optimistic this time! Your Swedish, Norwegian, Turkish, Greek, etc.. names should show up all OK with all the actual characters!
Because of the wrong character encoding, names and titles on the website (like Aşçıoğlu, Ilgın, Øyvind Åsane, Mayré Martínez) was being displayed in variously different ways (like A?ç?o?lu, ?lg?n, MartÃnez)..
If your name currently doesn’t look right (or your sketch titles), please edit it once more, so that it can be saved to database correctly! I am so sorry that you have to do these once again, because I was initially stupid enough not to realize the problem with the character encoding initially.
Please, please, let me know if you still have problems, so that I can work on it! You should be able to see all the characters fine.
I wanted to create a post in response to Charles Dietrich’s comment on the previous post, and I am taking that comment and conversation here so that we can have a more focused discussion on this issue. His comment was:
Since you brought up the license issue, I’d love it if the user could specify the license they want to use, including ‘All rights reserved’, ‘BSD’, and ‘GPL’ for code (which pretty much covers the bases, since none of these things are libraries) and the licenses that Flickr lets you choose among for content (or a subset including ‘All rights reserved’ and ‘creative commons sharealike’, since it’s a big list):
I guess the big change that I’m asking for is the right to say ‘All rights reserved’.
Thanks for your response on this. Actually, I have been thinking about the ‘all rights reserved’ option for a while, and sincerely, couldn’t find a definite conclusion on what to do.
As you mentioned, Flickr (the website I am taking a lot of inspiration on handling of shared creativity) provides those options, and it wouldn’t be hard to do it on OpenProcessing. And providing people options to select their preferred license really make sense. However, couple of things making my feet itch:
-> An All-rights-reserved (ARR) sketch doesn’t really make sense if it is provided with its source code option, so I think, a user who wants to ARR his/her sketch wouldn’t prefer to display the source code either. This makes sense, and I totally understand it. But as a result, I can imagine OpenProcessing becoming a deposit for interesting Java Applets, but much value being lost… From the comments, I observe that sketches really become valuable along their source code; an example comment I like seeing is “Very nice sketch with very short code!”. What makes a Processing sketch different from a flash animation is its source code approach. And I am trying to keep OpenProcessing a place to make that difference obvious, get prospective processing users interested and encourage them to learn by going through the code.
-> Without source code being shared, I believe the website wouldn’t be any different from a Flash exhibition website, from the point of someone who doesn’t know about processing…
-> Also, I believe this community had ever been better since Ben Fry and Casey Reas (and many supporters like Daniel Shiffman) had strictly tried to keep things open source and CC. You know, the Processing application is also under Creative Commons. They don’t restrict people to share their sketches under CC, which of course gives us a lot freedom. But at this point, if OpenProcessing allows for ARR sketches, I would feel that my efforts on this project wouldn’t return that much value other than providing a service for people to exhibit their sketches without any intention to improve the community.
Let me know what you guys think. This is definitely debatable, and can be tried; I can try to provide such a feature for testing purposes, to see how it goes. But, my worries are in the paragraph above. So let me know what you think.
Fixed some issues with embed function; so should be working fine right now. Below is an example, and let me know if you are having issues… Sorry if your previous trials on embedding your sketches didn’t quite work… All should be fine now.
How do you embed a sketch to your blog?
Click on Embed Code to see the code for the sketch, and copy/paste the embed code to you blog in HTML view.
Land is drawn with Perlin Noise. Cycle is PShape svg. Use ‘d’ to accelerate. Use ‘a’ to slow down. Press space to turn debug visualization on. This version is infinite. Below is an example:
Official OpenProcessing Blog
Welcome to the OpenProcessing Blog! I am posting here the latest news and updates on OpenProcessing, and also including some discussion with users about where OP can go, what should be included, what not, etc.. Feel free to contribute, and don't forget to check the latest sketches in OpenProcessing afterwards.
note: creative commons credit for background image goes to Matt Richard and his awesome sketch.
