ASCII Photo Booth by Scott Murray

I’ll be teaching another workshop on creative coding at the end of the month! Join us, and learn to use Processing to create your own interactive, digital art. Details at gaffta.org.

Practice, my MFA thesis project, will be set up for you to explore this Friday in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Practice is both a work of interactive video art and a design research project.

Unlike most other works of this medium, it does not reward bodily motion and exaggerated gestures, but encourages patience and self-reflection. In so doing, it explores the tension between emotional engagement and the uncomfortable ambiguity of not knowing what will happen next.

Friday, February 12

About 9:00 – 11:00pm

16th St. and Guerrero St., NE corner (Map)

In the event of rain, the piece will be installed the next night, Saturday, 2/13.

While working on deep ocean graphics for a client, I inadvertently created something more cloud-like.

LAIKA is a new, dynamic typeface, designed and constructed by Nicolas Kunz and Michael Flückiger. The genius here is that visual elements of the face (such as weight, serif prominence, and italic degree) are reframed as parameters, into which can be fed values from any source — either your own keyboard, or something more interesting like weight or distance sensors, so the visual typographic form can respond to physical factors in an installation environment. Try it out!

It’s done! This weekend’s creating coding workshop at GAFFTA went really well, despite Loveparade’s pounding revelry just outside. In case you missed it, you can experience all 10.5 hours of coding bliss in under two minutes — just watch the video below. Also, check out some of the great projects that the students made.

My souvenir Gray Area logo pin:

I’m very excited to announce that I will be co-teaching a two-day introduction to Processing at the new Gray Area Foundation for the Arts here in San Francisco! The workshop is the first in a series on creative coding, and coincides with Gray Area’s grand opening celebrations and initial exhibition, featuring work by C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback, and Stamen Design.

The Gray Area folks have created an amazing space downtown, and this workshop is an exciting chance to learn a ton of great new skills, and even meet one of Processing’s co-initiators. (C.E.B. will be making an appearance.)

The workshop is scheduled for Saturday, October 3rd & Sunday, October 4th, 1:00 – 6:00pm both days.

See GAFFTA’s site for the complete schedule, details, and registration.

Questions & Answers is my latest project: an experiment in new, non-linear narrative forms, or what I’m calling data-as-narrative. But really it’s just a fun way to explore some of the crazy, interesting stuff people write online.

I generated this image from the genetic code of a California case of H1N1 (posted today by the CDC). I fed the data into my color tools project, and assigned one color for each base found in DNA: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). The colors were chosen by searching ColourLovers for each of those base names and using the top result, i.e. the “best” colors for A, C, G, and T, according to ColourLovers.