Creative Programming

In my rondup of day one of Fronteers Conference 2014 I tried to touch most speakers at least briefly. For day two I want to do the same. As said, Fronteers 2014 is a well organised conference and one of high quality: speakers from Twitter, Google and Etsy are part of the line up. In addition to that it is held in a beautiful venue and a good lunch is served!

#fronteers14 @necolas: Building a web app without any components is like assembling a radio from… this. pic.twitter.com/kGPuJN4VyK

— Arjan Eising (@eising) 10 oktober 2014

more

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.

more

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?

more

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.

more

NOTICE: The below is an outdated article about Chrome devtools plugins. It is not up to date.

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!

more

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.

more