A couple of weekends ago I had the pleasure of spending two days locked in a very dark hot room learning to program. Sounds pretty excruciating doesn’t it – But believe me it wasn’t. Just a bit of background – I used to be a jack-of-all-trades developer and hung up my coding gloves because I was bored with building the same ole websites over and over and over again. (Back then Web 1.0 was a bit dull).
So back to OpenFrameworks. I met Joel Gethin Lewis last year when we were building the Christmas Card Making Machine and he introduced me to how he was doing face tracking and all this sexy stuff. He was writing everything in OpenFrameworks and I was astounded to learn this wasn’t some fancy custom solution he had used when he was at U.V.A, but a free open source system.
To explain what OpenFrameworks is, I’m going to be a bit simplistic so bear with me – It is basically a way of wrapping up all the really really nasty bits to do with programming graphics, sound, interaction etc and opening this up so with a few lines of code you can load in images, have them move around, control them etc. It was astoundingly simple.
Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson the lead developers of the project have created community which was born out of a desire to ease new comers into the complexities of programming. The other beautiful part of this equation is that the community actively develop and put code back into the eco-system. Open source programming is not a new thing, but it is incredibly interesting to see this in more competitive artist circles (as generally OpenFrameworks is used to create installations and art projects) and along with Processing there is a whole new breed interactive artists doing great work.
The course was held at UCL and was setup by Ruairi who runs the excellent Interactive Architecture site and Joel and the multi talented Memo Atken were running the course. The ratio of architects on the course was very high and this was really interesting to find out what they are doing with code when it comes to designing buildings – They are all very keen on generating whole buildings from code. Little snippets of a process can be fed into a generative loop and out will pop a whole building – This is staggering stuff and for them incredibly liberating. Let’s just hope they don’t become too seduced by the computer as buildings need that irrevernce that lifts them.
