Matthew

Love on
Processing
and Summer
workshop
with its
founder
Casey Reas
by Will Kotheimer

Processsing is an open source computer program

created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry at MIT. It is Java
based, and has been used to introduce programming
to designers and people who do not usually pro-
gram. It is also a powerful program used in graphics
and data-visualizations, a concept where statistics
are often referred to by size of icons on screen. This
is not the only way processing is used though. Ben
Fry, one of its creators, uses processing mainly to
demonstrate genetics visualizations. (If you have
a half an hour, you can watch his talk at UX Week
here). Casey Reas, by contrast, uses processing for
graphics.

Matthew Love, a student at WKU, got a chance to

learn under Casey Reas at the Anderson Ranch in
Colorado this past summer. Matt had been talking
about it in design class most of the semester, and I
was almost encouraged to go. Matt is a student of
graphic design, who is also going for a Math minor.
His interest is also in data visualizations, but when
I asked him about programming, he said he didn’t want to concentrate on code, but rather
on design. Instead, he uses code to achieve his objectives.

As Matt explained, processing gives the user an ability to organize data from music, video,
or statistics, or just about any other data set, and present it as visually meaningful. It allows
creation of drawing applications from coordinates of mouse-x and mouse y, clicks, and un-
clicks, like most other languages. But it seems easier, and like flash is primarily focused on
its interactive quality.
“I see processing as the obvious door to get
into the programming mindset, especially
when dealing with data.” Matthew said. Matt
gave a run down of his five-day experience
at the Anderson ranch. Day 1 began with a
drawing program, and Day 2 focused on user
input. From there the course diverged into
projects where the students made their own
Video Feed program
visions, and Casey guided them navi-
gating processing’s immense libraries.
The students created things called
‘sketches’ that were really small pro-
grams that did a certain functions.
Over the course of five days Matt com-
plied around 25 of them. . . .”He kind of just
guided us the first few days, in his infinite
wisdom, and build upon what we had learned
and really go in any sort of direction we had
wanted to go. Since I knew what processing
could do and I had a good idea and had been
working on it myself – he helped me getting
into 3-d and that sort of thing, or video feeds,
modifying those.”
Some of Matt’s video feeds and mouse-con-
trolled events programs can be seen here. Its
hard to represent them and do them justice
without video, because most of them are cre-
ated in real time. But still its easier to show a
picture than explain this in some cases.
A progam called “23” was a visualization in-
volving a video feed.. He pointed his webcam
at us and then was able to manipulate the way
we looked by changing variables in the pro-
gram. “ I think its five different filters or types
of processes that is used to interpret the we-
bcam. It’s drawing degrees of a circle for the
brightness values,” he said, “areas that
are lighter are a quarter of a circle. And
areas that are darker are whole circles
which gives it more pigment.”
He pointed out to me, “look, if you stay
still, the background is moving more
than we are. There’s a cosine function
2-D drawing program
drawing a circle with each of those, but only
the points that are lighter, like the sky, so it
makes sort of a dizzying effect.” But when I
prodded him further about the video feed
he was quick to add, “I’m not going to take
“I see processing as the obvious door
to get into the programming mind-
set, especially when dealing with
data.”
credit for that, that’s from their libraries.”
“. . .I really like the art side and I re-
Processing shares many aspects of other ally like the applicable side.”
computer programs, including a way to
port to the internet (see my article on
Joshua Harris, who also uses processing),
and libraries. In this respect, one of the
things a programmer brings to process-
ing is his original idea. One of Matt’s
more interesting ideas was adapted from
a Steve Reich piece where two drums
beat the same rhythm, but one went 99.9
beats per minute while the other went
100 beats per minute. Matt adapted this
to a piece of visual data where circles
transversed a screen, one faster than the

Steve Reich inspired piece (see at-

tached PDFs)

Like many who are involved in Pro-

Square height based on light and dark values
other about that same ratio in clock wise
and counter clockwise motion, and when
they crossed they created a line from the
center to that point; as he explains:
“It’s a generative piece, so its giving each
one a value each time the circles go
around, and that’s the rate of increase;
and whenever these two meet up, it draws
a line from the center to the outside.
What its doing is its using a proximity
value. When the proximity is less than
one, then it uses one of the coordinates.
This was day three, and this is when I
knew that I was really happy I had come.”
cessing at this stage, Matt doesn’t
know what he’ll do with it yet, but
he is convinced at its effectiveness.
“Two of the people there at Anderson
Ranch this summer were part of a de-
sign firm based out of Denver. Those
people found themselves at a design
firm, but I guess there’s always com-
mercial applications of it, including
research, finding the relationship between
data.”
While he is mainly about the arts and
graphics side of it, he’s sees tremendous
potential in either side. “I really like the
art side and I really like the applicable
side.”
Will Kotheimer is majoring in Advertising
and Computer Science at WKU. Contact
him at wkotheimer@gmail.com