Creative Programming

So I was looking forward to Fronteers14 since their first announcement and ticket sales last April. I was so much looking forward to it because I attended Fronteers13 also and I was very much impressed by the richness and amount of information you receive in such a short time span. That really is the up-side of visiting conferences.

The venue is as always a beautiful place to spend some time. The Tuschinski Theatre was built in the 1920s in the then popular Art Deco style. If you might get bored during a talk, just take a look around, you’ll see so much nice details: visually a very attractive spot.

#fronteers14 venue details pt. 2: "Toilet Dames Trap Af" pic.twitter.com/XUWL94u16i

— y-a-v-a.org (@_y_a_v_a_) 9 oktober 2014

Just days before the start, some speaker mentioned physical discomfort: feeling sick and/or having a cold, that I was hoping none of all speakers really would call off for the conference.

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Visiting the Gemeente Museum Den Haag — currently called Kunstmuseum Den Haag — I came across a painting I knew already for quite a while, and which I like very much, but now it triggered something. Looking at Vilmos Huszár‘s painting Compositie II (schaatsenrijders) from 1917, I saw, although being sober, the ice skaters move from spot to spot on the painting. I thought: wouldn’t it be great to animate this?

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Last week I was visiting Fronteers 2013 conference in beautiful Tuschinsky cinema in Amsterdam. At the conference, Paul Lewis had a presentation on browser rendering performance. He showed a slide which contained an animation that showed how a browser calculates and paints the screen. Some people on twitter were wonderin how this animation was created. It appeared to be a modified Firefox build. The visualization of paint events cought my interest and I was curious if it was possible to catch Chrome paint events and animate them myself.

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So I wanted to create a Chrome devtools plugin. Scraping the Building a Chrome Extension developer page a couple of weeks ago, I found out that chrome.devtools.panels is available. I hadn’t looked into extension development much since creating the Googlevich extension, which is an artwork of which I do not know wether it still works, so I was happily surprised to see a devtools api!

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Cleaning up some old stuff I came across a nice and simple example of how to use the internet as a resource for something artistic. When I’m teaching, I always pay attention to the possibilities of using the web as much more than just a Yellow Pages platform where you, as an artist, can show off your work with a portfolio. Just like a lot of Arduino addicts use sensoric data to visualize or moderate a Processing.org sketch or a different piece of hardware, one can use stuff from the internet as a means for a visual end.

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