Processing: A New Art Form

Published on Sunday, September 7th 2008 and last revised September 7, 2022 at 8:10 pm
Classification: Weblog • Taxonomy: Art, Framework, Graphics, Imaging, Open Source, OS X, Programming, Software, Unix, Windows

I am becoming increasingly impressed and intrigued by the multimedia produced with the Processing framework. There are some stunning artworks and videos emerging and it’s all serving to make me ever more curious about the capabilities of the system.

A lot of the work produced reminds me of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST demo scene of the eighties and I find myself feeling terribly nostalgic.

But Processing isn’t just about art — the framework is also used for some very serious data visualisation too.

It’s all very impressive.

Further Reading:

The History of Visual Communication
Visualisations and Infographics
Information Aesthetics

2 Reader Comments for “Processing: A New Art Form”

Authored by: Kevin Spencer • Comment Posted: Sep 8th, 2008 •Permalink

You know for some reason I completely skipped the Amiga. I cut my gaming teeth on Commodore’s Vic-20 and 64 respectively but then sort of forgot about all things video game until I bought a SNES. I think I might have missed out on something special.
Authored by: DarkBlue • Comment Posted: Sep 8th, 2008 •Permalink

Yes Kevin I think you did. Some of the Atari ST demos were very good but on the Amiga demos were in another league.

The graphics hardware of the Amiga was just so hackable and the guys who really knew the platform were able to make those chips perform way beyond what their designers probably intended. The Amiga was capable of producing pure eye candy - amazing considering the limited (by today’s standards) hardware.

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