One of our members Marie made a beautiful painting of Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. Sadly when Marie moved away from Philly to pursue her programming career her painting got lost in the abyss that is the Hive76 utility closet. Luckily her painting resurface and is now on display for everyone to appreciate.
Thank you Marie, we miss you!
On Wednesday, Feb 19th 5:30-8:00 p.m Hive 76 will be at The Philadelphia Museum of Art!
Come out and support us on this PAY WHAT YOU WISH ADMISSION night. Let us share and explain some of our great projects while you view some of the Museum’s amazing collection for as little as a penny!
Got a sweetheart? Want to meet a sweetheart? David and Leslie are back to share the Valentine’s love. Make sweet gifts and learn about 3D printing and paper circuits at the same time. For the gamer in your life, there’s a Valentine Creeper. Got an inspirational do-gooder? Here’s a movie inspired MockingJay pin. Just want to show you care? Well, they’re working on a pixel heart necklace/keychain, that is sure to please.
While your piece prints, make a Valentine card that will illuminate your sweetheart’s soul. Bring some materials from around your house and combine them with a variety of papers, copper tape, LED and battery to create the perfect paper circuit. If you love crafting and electronics, you are about to experience maker heaven. If you’ve never been here before, you can tour the space and find out more about other member’s projects. Munchies will be on hand. Don’t forget to comment below so we know you are coming!
Our friends over at The Hacktory (Repurposing Technology, Making Art) are running a Kickstarter to raise matching funds for an excellent project to unite artists with the latest technology to empower new designs. From their Kickstarter page:
Electronics and digital technology can infuse works of art with an element of magic. At The Hacktory we have literally put this magic in people’s hands, through classes and large public events. We want to do more though. We want to make our classes available to artists. We’ve found that they are usually the most excited to take our classes and play with technology, but usually the least able to pay for our classes.
The Hacktory is creating a program called T.E.R.A. Incognita: Tech Education and Residency for Artists. Our goal is to support artists who want to create new work and experiment with technology such as cameras, projectors, sensors, robots, software and circuits. The name “T.E.R.A Incognita” is part acronym, part vision for the program. We want to give these artists an opportunity to learn and explore at the edges of technology and art, literally in unchartered territory, to create new experiences and new possibilities with code, hardware and creative expression.
The Kickstarter ends on Monday, so go check it out and consider making a pledge! Some great rewards are being offered too.
PJ and a number of other Hive members have been fortunate enough to participate in preparations for the Drexel Design Futures Lab “Projects 12/13” exhibition. PJ was almost certainly the most involved Hive contributor — he helped with the development of a number of key software elements for several of the exhibits.
I had grown some fairly large sheets of bacterial cellulose in the past, and was interested in having an excuse to grow something even larger — so sign me up! Tashia wanted a sheet that started out about 4’x8′ so that the final screen could be cropped to dimensions that were about the size of a slightly gigantic person.I wound up getting involved in the creation of a special display screen that was part of an interactive piece which allows people to “play” with a computer model of bacterial swarms. This piece was part of Tashia Tucker’s exhibit, and she wanted an “organic looking” display surface. After some brainstorming that included condemnations of the high price of silicone etc., PJ suggested bacterial cellulose. What!? The idea of a movie screen made by real bacteria to show movies of simulated bacteria was too “meta” to pass up.
Yikes — this was literally a tall order. Bacterial Cellulose (BC) is created by the same organisms that are used to ferment Kombucha — in fact, the “Shroom” or “Scoby” in a Kombucha culture is a big lump of cellulose. So this was simple, in principle, but the scale of the piece left a lot of novel details that had to be worked out.
Continue reading “Drexel Design Futures, Bacterial Cellulose (and a world record, maybe?)”
This Thursday, please join us at a FREE exhibition of the work of Cornelius Varley (1800-1860) put on by the venerable American Philosophical Society. It is a fantastic exploration of the life work of this fellow tinkerer and inventor who’s insight and explorations reminds me a lot of our Hive76 members!
A few of us will also be presenting at this event! We will have live 3D sugar glass printing, exhibitions of Brendan’s boom cases, Dan’s 8 mm RockBox, PJ’s electronics, Corrie’s textiles and artwork, Chris Terrell’s wood burning, and maybe a few more things.
We hope to see you there! Deets and directions below.
Deets:
Free Refreshments (wine, food, music) will be provided at the event!!
APS Requests your RSVP HERE: museum@amphilsoc.org
Thursday, June 6th, 2013
5:30-7:30 pm
APS Museum in Philosophical Hall
104 S. Fifth Street, Philadelphia, PA
Lately, I’ve been teaching myself the Racket programming language. It has a very interesting combination of tools, training-wheels-mode, and rocket-ship-mode. Originally built as a teaching programming language, it has significantly outgrown its pedagogical roots and is now a very robust applications language. I’m even developing a business project in it as we speak!
But it is a little rough around the edges. While it has a lot to make it a very easy language to learn, it is ultimately meant for computer scientists, those in training and those in working. There is an underlying feeling to everything that “this easy thing will eventually get harder.” As I see more and more inside the Racket community itself, I know that that is not their intention, and that they hope to be able to bring the joy of programming to everyone, regardless of their background.
A tool that has brought the joy of programming to everyone has been Processing. Processing, in a round-about way, brought a lot of features of the Racket[1] environment to Java. There are some very, very clear parallels between the DrRacket programming environment and the Processing editor. If this was unintentional, then it at least clearly indicates the superiority of the form as a pedagogical tool, as two independent environments have both evolved the same feature. If it was intentional, then there are ways in presentation in which Processing has grown past Racket that I think could be brought back to Racket-land.
At a very high level, you can see the similarities between the DrRacket editor and the Processing editor. I have intentionally made the code samples different for each, as they represent more of the canonical methodology for each language[2].
As an artist with a very strong background in computer science, there are things about Racket that appeal to me that Processing will never be able to do[3]. There are things about Processing that are very awesome and very nice that Racket could do, if someone with a very strong background in computer science took the time to make it so.
Where Racket succeeds over Lisp and Scheme, and where Processing–and thus Java–succeeds over all, is that enough is provided for you to not require you to learn the more advanced language features to get good results. Racket calls it “batteries included”, and it is, I believe, the most important concept that Processing borrows from Racket. Beginners don’t want to learn about “public static void mains”; to this day I still don’t know why that garbage is so necessary.
My hope is to try to bring some of the batteries of Processing back to Racket. The potential is there for Racket to be every bit as popular with artists as Processing is, today. The things that it lacks in comparison to Processing are relatively trivial to develop, in relation to the things that Processing lacks in comparison to Racket. By bringing artists into the much more powerful environment of the Racket programming language, once they have mastered the fundamentals of programming with the training-wheels mode, Racket can be molded by artists, for artists, to let people think and program in ways that the programmer-artist chooses, not in ways that the original language designer chose for them. If there are two groups of people that I know hate being told how to think more than anyone, it’s artists and programmers.
I’d like to hear from the Hive76 readership, especially those who have experience with Processing (though all are welcome to comment), about what you like and don’t like about Processing, about programming, about art, about putting code down in text files, etc. This certainly applies to the Arduino crowd, as well, as Arduino is based on Processing. In the meantime, I have a few thoughts on where the work could begin.
First impressions are important, and most programming language websites are prettier than Racket’s. I would more readily crib from Ruby than from Processing here. Ruby’s website is very clean and concise, very inviting and pleasing. Everyone cares about taste, especially artists.
Racket’s website is built in Racket, with a sub-language called Scribble, specifically designed for building documents and documentation. It’s an excellent language, but its default styling is kind of ugly. Restyling the site is a low-hanging fruit that could bring in more people, if only because they don’t jump ship prematurely.
The Racket documentation has its heart in the right place, but ultimately feels like its drawing examples are just pat examples. The drawings aren’t very interesting and its not immediately obvious how one gets to more interesting things. See this page for an example. It’s easy to draw a smiley face in Racket, it’s much harder to draw a good looking smiley face. And before it becomes apparent, the documentation dives too quickly into the computer science topics thereafter. In contrast, Processing starts off with examples that are extremely visually compelling. As people are visual creatures by nature, this seems the superior methodology. Note that the Processing example is the introductory page to the documentation–one click off of the front page–whereas the Racket example is several pages into the documentation–two clicks and several screenfuls of scrolling off of the front page. Much more compelling examples in Racket are much more deeply hidden.
The Processing website is built around showcasing what people have done with Processing. While Racket’s package system can be considered the same thing, to a degree (and it is already in the process of getting better), it is again not as visually compelling. Racket needs an elevator pitch, a high level view that shows the answer to “what will you do with Racket?”.
Footnotes:
[1] Historical Note: Racket has been around since 1994, when it was originally called PLT Scheme. They figured they lost more people being immediately associated with Scheme and Lisp than they gained, so in 2010 they changed the name to underscore the fact that there is so much more to Racket than the name “Scheme” implies. Suffice to say, for beginners it doesn’t matter, other than knowing that their is history to the project and it isn’t going away anytime soon.
[2] There are problems in both examples; both are overly simplistic and both would not scale well for large applications. But the gist of the difference is there, Racket is about functions that define what we want to happen, Processing (because it is based on Java) is about instructions. The differences to the non computer scientist are difficult to explain, so for now you will just have to take my word for it that the former is a generalization of the latter and is therefore more robust and open for greater expressiveness.
[3] For the computer scientists reading, succinctly: macros. You either know what I mean or you don’t, this is not the place to get into a technical description of macros. For the non-computer scientists, the best analogy I can make is magic. Magic isn’t real in our world, but I can think of nothing that comes closer to resembling it than the massive productivity gains that macros can afford, once mastered. But neither is mastery of macros in Racket required to do great work. Processing is what happens to languages like Java that do not have macros. In Racket, something like Processing would stay a part of Racket and not be a separate project.
Blender, the awesome open-source do-everything model/rig/render/animate program continues to be an important part of my toolkit. The Artist Community is definitely a huge bonus. So check out this excellent tutorial over at BlenderGuru.com
So…I put Sean’s Harrow through it’s paces, and here are some of my newest desktop backgrounds.
First you get the basic render down. I use 32-bit color with OpenEXR file format, saving z-buffer info too, just, you know, in case you need it later. You should get something like this… kind of flat when viewed on a crappy computer screen, but i assure you there is a ton of color info there for fine tuning later.
With all that extra color depth, you can easily fine tune the contrast, like so.
Then you need to come up with the shadow version… Andrew Price from BlenderGuru does this in a new Scene. I like the stark contrast… when you look carefully the sharp edges tell you that you are looking at a perspective view.
Put it all together, and you get a softly-back-lit Logo. WIN!
The Creator’s Project released a new video, and our sugar printing, gelation, and blood pumping was featured in it! Trackback is to 3Ders.org The project goal is to unify artists and technologists and this video is focused on 3D Printing:
And I just got done with a talk at ScienceOnTap Philly! It was a truly excellent night! Special thanks to the Organizers and also the Hivers who came out or emailed in their support! You peeps are the best.
Here are some pics via the Twittersphere. Thanks to the photographers for posting!
