How I ever meet programming-related art and so on

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A few years ago, when I finished my Fine Art studies in Britain, I started to explore more possibilities of “Art”.

 

The modern technology, in this era, has certainly changed everything, and that includes the area of art. It’s no more restricted to painting studios, theatres, or days-and-days of practice in instruments: I would consider this is the age when art is closer to us than ever.

 

So as a more ‘traditional-trained’ art student, during my time trying to create some new media installations, I discovered a new term: “Creative Coding”. And, what a new world.

 

This new form of art seems to obtain all kinds of senses we have; or in another word, computational art itself is an aggregation of many forms. It can be highly interactive using tools like Arduino; it also can jump out of the restriction of timing and spacing, which can hardly be achieved by traditional art forms. The boundaries between “audiences” and “users” are becoming vaguer than ever.

 

And coding is behind all those fantasies. So I wish to create some new media arts through my study this term. I appreciate some artists like Zach Lieberman or GMUNK, and also artists in Open Processing; I believe that this new form of art can be even more widely used in museums or public areas in the future. I imagine creating interactive installations, large or mobile, while artistic, in different places or webpages. All with the support of computational coding skills I will be learning.

 

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A little thing about ‘BB-8 in Star Wars’

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The process of drawing is fun; I have used some of the techniques from The Coding Train and some other tutorials I learned in P5js to help making it easier. So the first thing I did was to add a function of mousePressed to print the position of mouseX and mouseY, in order to locate the position of certain objects when I needed to.

 

So it went relatively smoothly, but I wonder how I could get a gradient color-changing effect? Just in terms of making the 2-D image look more 3-D. Is there a way to render it with colors only, without changing the whole thing to WEBGL 3D model?

 

Another problem is the complexity of the coding. I’ve used over 100 lines to create the whole thing, is there a way to simplify all these?

 

The experience of using web editor is actually not bad, but previously I’ve used OpenProcessing more. I think the P5js web editor will reflect on typos or grammar mistakes faster, but I’ll prefer OpenProcessing in terms of layout design.

 

So yeh, can’t wait to explore more!