Above is a short time lapse of an image being dynamically recreated in a Pointillism style using Processing.

Processing is an open-source programming language that derives from Java. It focuses largely on visual art created using code. Many of the example programmes written in Processing are dynamic visual pieces.

My experience with coding is mostly web based however I have had a good amount of experience in Visual Basic, which although not directly related to processing I found very similar in nature. I didn’t really have a hard time picking up the basics of Processing with the help of the instructional videos and David Jonas who visited us in class. The first program I created was a painting program in which a solid block of colour would be left in place at the position of the mouse as long as the left mouse button was being held. This was a very simple program to create, and it probably took around 5 minutes of use with Processing.

After I had created this I started to explore the examples provided on the Processing website. The video above is an example found on the website that creates a simple pointillist effect using ellipses colored according to pixels in an image. I modified this example to generate my own photographs and I also changed the size of the ellipses used to generate the image. I also modified a version of this code to use multiple image files at one time in different positions that combined to create one image.

Below is another example found on the size that rapidly updates the position of an ellipses and calculates the way it would bounce off of the sides of the environment. Figure 1 shows the code for this program and Figure 2 is a short video clip of the code in action.

Figure 1

Figure 2

In this page I talk about how Processing can be used as a Programming Language to develop dynamic visual content.