Ben Fry anemone screenshot

Ben Fry’s Anemone is a generative illustration created from web traffic – a web traffic creature! (I need one in material, sculptural form on my desk so I know when I need to “water” Create Digital Motion so it doesn’t wilt!)

I’ll be out next week at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado, where I’m taking a workshop led by Processing co-creator Ben Fry.

In this workshop we will focus on Processing’s video library, learning how to play with pixels from a live camera by analyzing their makeup, altering colors, and experimenting with effects. We will also explore video as an input to control graphic elements on-screen, whether by controlling their movement or generating dynamic, abstract compositions.

I’ve done work with video and Processing before, but naturally not with Ben Fry himself nearby, so I’m quite excited! I’ll be interested to see how he teaches it, since video performance is not a strong suit of Processing (largely the fault of Java, not Processing), though it is an interesting tool for using video for other tasks.

I’ll try to “liveblog” some of it next week, but if that doesn’t work, I promise some code examples of my own and other tidbits when I return.