An excellent point, Mark, but I wonder if a centrally organized journal wouldn't prove to be a bottleneck. I'm not actually so sure about the Processing community producing academics, editorial panels and peer review. The Processing spirit seems to be more about autodidacts, DIY and source code sharing. In fact, I don't know of any proper papers about Processing per se. (Correct me, anyone)

Right now Tom Carden's Processing blog aggregator does a good job of picking up work by Processing users who have blogs. I would suggest that as regular reading. I'm currently maintaining (shameless plug) the Generator.x blog about generative art and design, which includes a fair amount of Processing information.

Of course, if a substantial body of (academic) information comes into being it should be linked from this site.

Hmm, in Ben's last status report there are mumblings about Casey working on an "official book" on Processing, but I have no hard facts about that. The community would of course benefit from the outside recognition a book would give, and I think it's a matter of time before one happens anyway.

Having been blogging for a little while now, I see the power of blogs but they function more as temporal texts, usually lacking a depth that an actual article would have. I do enjoy the aspect of distributed narratives blogs can have, though. Blogs fill a different purpose than these forums, too. I would agree that the forums are excellent for getting stuff done, but they're pretty poor for academic knowledge production.

There have been thinking (and writing) on the artist / programmer phenomenon as far back as computers have existed. Generative art arguably has an even longer pedigree than the computer. Currently, there is a move on to find historical references and roots for the generative art movement, with conceptualists like Sol LeWitt and abstract artists like Bridget Riley being convenient examples.

In the Generator.x conference I am trying to bring to light the theoretical side of the discourse, but through practicians. Unfortunately, being a non-academic I have not been very careful to make sure that there will be a written documentation of the project. So the blog will have to do.

For the record, many artists publish their texts online:
- Texts by Golan Levin
- Texts by Casey Reas

Not forgetting Paul Klee of course. He'd have to be in my league table.

mark hill wrote on Jul 28^th, 2005, 11:36am:


Just to pick up this point - the criteria for inclusion in Processing Blogs as it currently stands are very relaxed. I would include any periodically updated site which features at least some Processing-related content and is available as an XML/RSS/Atom feed. I don't think it serves as a good place for longer explorative or discursive writing.  I wouldn't start posting that kind of content on my current blog either, though I might post it elsewhere and discuss it on my blog.  (In my experience, even blogs where people discuss their work and its critical impact tend to be 'meta' in this way.  Especially if people's work is blogging ).

I think I consider the possibility of a 'Processing Journal' in much the same way as I now consider the 'Processing London' meetings we tried to organise.  We would arrive, and show our work, and maybe half of it would be Processing.  But the thing which drew us together was the things we had learnt whilst exploring our ideas within Processing, not this or that implementation platform.  (I have since encouraged people to attend dorkbot London instead - it's a more open and appropriate platform, where one can focus on the work not on how it was implemented).

I think what I'm trying to say, to borrow toxi's phrase (again), is that "Processing is an approach".  It goes from strength to strength in terms of power and stability, and remains an admirably concise and expressive form of Java, but its main strengths lie in the community, reference, tutorials, learning and teaching environment.

On the subject of the background to generative art, I think that visual/experiential/constructive/procedural expression has existed throughout history.  It's reflected in our fascination with natural phenomena, too.  Across cultures there are creative things people have done which I would call generative/procedural art (accepting your caution that this could be too open a definition).  I clumsily attempted to enumerate some of these things here in response to a question about the history of generative art.  (Yes there is an element of "ooh shiny!" to it all too, I think).

One thing I would like to see explored is the fact that there is a noticable "Processing look" (more than just 200x200 clickable thingy, but that's not far off).  I think that the higher profile Processing pieces almost all eschew this look, but it is there nevertheless.  Is it as a result of the mindset of Processing users, a result of the implied artistic validity of certain kinds of work, or a result of the software making certain procedures and effects 'easy'  Is it the result of the low barrier to sharing and publishing work, even for people new to the field (Do Director or Flash have a similar influence on look and feel  What about MAX/MSP  I would argue yes.)

Anyway, I waffle...

Yes, there's room for critical theory in Processing.  But I would rather see it join the existing bodies of work on interactive art, generative art, interaction design, game design and so on.  I would welcome pointers to journals or other platforms which already contain this type of discussion.

Elsewhere:
http://www.mediaartnet.org/
(http://www.mediaartnet.org/themes/generative-tools/ in particular)
http://www.rhizome.org/
http://www.generative.net/
(http://www.generative.net/papers/aesthetics/ for example)

Casey's talking about his favourite/inspirational books, here:

http://www.inspireme.tv/view.php?id=5