Ben Fry Talk at Auraria Campus
I got a notice today from Prof. Chris Coleman that Ben Fry, one of the creators of Processing, was giving a talk the Auraria Campus this evening. It’s the last week of classes and things are crazy, but I’m so excited by Processing and the environment around it that it was just the right thing to do. Having seen several of the projects he discussed before, it was still great to see him speak in person and give a short background on how he ended up working on Processing in the first place. He also showed some of the human genome visualization projects he developed as part of his PhD research at MIT (these projects were featured in Ang Lee’s Hulk – Photo).
He highlighted the concept of sketching and showed a beautiful visualization (by Robert Hodgin aka flight404) as well as an initial concept sketch, which was a very simple experiment. Because I’ve been feeling very stuck creatively as of late, this was an inspiring reminder to just make stuff and iterate. Processing is made for sketching, and for being one part of your current workflow, another point that Fry brought up. He doesn’t want Processing to be the both the beginning and endpoint of your work.
A couple ideas he highlighted were important enough for me to write down (and circle a couple times):
- Consider the shape of data
- Make visual transitions meaningful (not just the data at transition endpoints)
He’s teaching some workshops at Metro tomorrow and taught today and yesterday. I’m bummed that I couldn’t be a part of those through some kind of collaborative visiting artist arrangement between DU and Metro. Maybe next time.
