Making interactive art with Javascript (BarCampBoston 2013)

js_interactive_art_talk.md

Making interactive art with Javascript (BarCampBoston 2013)

@whichlight

community

ubiquity

interest

(not so much the technical parts of the language)

ART + JS

some art i've made what I loved what I learned

who i am

• embedly
• new american public art
• boston creative coders (check us out!)

1. Bubblegum Postcard

• inspired by kusama

• first made in processing

• used processing JS to port it

• processing --> processing.js

• easier to share it

• a year or so later. interactive projection piece

• one week, minimal installation

• socket.io , touchevents

• testing

• grand rapids

• providence

• saginow

prototyping was quick

sharing was easy

2. Playing with the kinect

• streaming data into the browser
• socketio didn't work
• webstreams!!
• websocket stream from max
• video stream worked
• Depth map and computer vision
• from the show

js worked for real time image processing

not as fast as oF

needs libfreenect installation

streaming takes up a lot of resources

other web possibilities! (3Dghangout, web audio API)

3. Web Audio Synths

• minimal synths on tumblr
• d3 + web audio api
• d3 simple selector/event binding
• open the swarm
• code for open the swarm
• resonance
• more synth stuff

include code in tumblr posts can be limiting or buggy

easy to share the synths

4. Leap Motion Drone

• streams the events as json
• multi-theremin
• some demos

5. dancey dots

• mouse sharing
• add sounds!
• demo
• code

websockets is simple out of the box

hard to scale websockets

6. reddit network visualization

• zomg
• HN conversations, reddit conversations
• machine reading reddit ... but it's crazy nested
• visualize as a network with d3, all client side
• http://blog.embed.ly/post/57097477000/visualizing-discussions-on-reddit-with-a-d3-network-and
• fine with the traffic
• the app
• when people realized they could change the vis

lots of tools available, fun mashups

a strong community

EDIT (after the talk): Lots of good questions asked. One was how folks who are coming from the tech/coding side could get into making this sort of art. I'd suggest checking out sites like Creator's Project and seeing what kind of projects sing to you. What feel compelling and expressive to you. Go to interactive art shows if there are any around. Soon you'll find ideas coming.

From the other angle, if you're an artist and looking to get in code, you're in a similar place that I was. Go to meetups, go to hackerspaces, and as you learn, be around people and see how they talk and reason about code. See what they make too. The combination of that and little projects goes a long way.