Playing With Processing

This is an animation I did for a Computer Graphics class homework, using the Processing framework, without using any of the built in 2D/3D cartesian transformations, but manually implementing them after learning about them at class. You can find at GitHub my homeworks for this course.

Processing is the language many Computational Artists use nowadays to make some neat stuff, like hypnotic geometric GIFs, glitched art, interactive artistic installations using external hardware input, etc. See for yourself some examples of what can be done with it.

I saw some cool people doing things like distorted photos so I wanted to do something similar like glitched images doing pixel sort on the rows, or creating filters by playing around with the RGB channels. All these were done with direct pixel manipulation, and the use of crazy bitwise operations, formulas based on RGB value, and loops..

I kept changing the code quickly to see the output so I’ve lost the code to generate these.

Processing is awesome, it is built on top on Java but at the same time is fast (and faster if you are using low-level stuff), and allows exporting to Android and Javascript with no changes to the code (if you are using nothing more than the default bindings and libraries, no platform specific stuff).

It has its own IDE, the basic idea of is that if you are going to work with the raw Processing language, you can export the working app to other platforms without making any changes to the code, the IDE handles that, but at the cost that you can’t use any existing library that is specific to any of the platforms.

It also makes a lot easier to manage input events (mouse, keyboard, external sensors/devices) without dealing yourself with the management of threads, it creates automatically an event loop, perfect for interactive non-blocking code. It also has an extensive API for graphic/geometric functions and transformations.