Op Art in Processing

Activity: Talk or presentation for an academic audienceOral presentation for an academic audience

Description

When teachers introduce text-based programming to pupils who have already mastered coding in Scratch, one of the common challenges is the immediate step backward in terms of what students can reasonably make. A highly visual language such as Processing, particularly in its modern, web-based p5.js guise, eliminates this difficulty, allowing pupils to produce visually stunning art, animations, and interactive media, all while learning to express their ideas in a text-based programming language. An introductory text-based programming course in p5.js offers much opportunity for the integration of art and computing. In this session, I introduce Processing through the online p5.js editor, demonstrating how it provides the “heavy lifting” needed to allow students to create graphics, animations, and interactive media in their browsers. The session takes as a starting point the paintings of Bridget Riley (1931–), a British artist who was one of the pioneering figures of the “Op Art” movement, in which complex, geometric paintings play with the viewer through optical illusions. Her work is highly accessible to young people and lends itself to algorithmic construction. We’ll deconstruct a number of Riley’s paintings to plan how they can be recreated in code, then create our own digital versions of the paintings, drawing on and illustrating the foundational programming constructs of sequence, selection, and iteration. We explore how each of these “sketches” can be extended beyond the affordances of the traditional canvas by adding animation effects or interactivity using simple keyboard or mouse responses. Workshop participants will get access to the source code for completed sketches and will be encouraged to experiment to make their own original versions. The workshop concludes by exploring some of the other ways to use Processing in an art/computing integration: It provides an accessible library for creating Instagram-like filters through manipulating pixel color values, and it might even be used as an introduction to object-oriented programming through the development of a Turtle class.

Estimated audience numbers (if applicable)

60
Period14 Jul 2021
Event titleCSTA Virtual Conference 2021
Event typeConference
LocationChicago, United States, IllinoisShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational