Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture
Chandler McWilliams
Developer : San Francisco
topics: Programming Languages, Processing, Rock and Roll, Software, and Installations
filed under: Art, Design, and Developers
http://tbg.cm/eeLAIn
Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture
Casey Reas, Chandler McWilliams, LUST
Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN 9781568989372
7×8.5 inches (17.8×21.6 cm)
Paperback, 176 pages
In the summer of 2007 Casey Reas and I taught a workshop titled “Form + Code” at the Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles. We had bandied about the idea of writing a book together, and the workshop seemed a great way to kick things off. The Dutch design collective LUST came on-board in November. It was important to the three of us that design be considered at an equal level as the authorship of text. Casey and I focused on the outline, text, images and worked closely with LUST to find other relevant projects and develop a design language that not only presented, but embodied many of the ideas found in the text. We also wanted to make the book affordable and widely available; both of which structured our decisions about the paperback format and Princeton Architectural Press as a publisher.
Casey and I teach in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA. Both of us teach courses on programing in a arts and design context, occasionally to an audience that isn’t convinced why they would need to know such a thing. We found that we were trying to articulate and answer the same questions over and over, quarter after quarter. Those questions became the core organizing force behind the book:
How has software affected the visual arts?
What is the potential for software within the visual arts?
As a designer, artist, or architect, why would I want or need to write software?
What is the potential for software within the visual arts?
As a designer, artist, or architect, why would I want or need to write software?
The text from our formal proposal (August 2008!) that Casey recently posted still is one of the best descriptions of what we set out to achieve:
Form+Code discusses the role of software in visual design, art, and architecture. It hopes to generate interest in creating visual and spatial form with software across diverse fields by focusing on the history, theory, and practice of software in the arts. The book is about one quarter text and three quarters images. It is organized around two parallel narratives: one told through images and captions, and the other through essays with related diagrams and images. This allows the book to be read cover-to-cover or leisurely looked through as a source of inspiration.
The book is divided into seven chapters: What is Code?, Computers and Form, Repetition, Transformation, Parameters, Visualization, and Simulation. The first two chapters set the foundation for the rest of the book by discussing the history of the computer in the arts and how software is used to create form. The five themes of repetition, transformation, parameters, visualization, and simulation are deeply linked to code. Each of these sections begin with an essay to define the territory, continues with images and captions, and concludes with code examples written in a few designer-friendly programming language such as Processing and ActionScript (the code won’t be included in the book, but will be available at www.formandcode.com). Form+Code is not a programming tutorial; its goal is to inspire though the discussion of themes and projects.
...
The book is intended as a foundation text and there are no prerequisites.
Find out more and find code examples on the website, http://formandcode.com .
0 comments