Thursday, January 29, 2015

Coding handicrafts

This semester in Bauhaus-Uni starts to be in the end, next week the lectures will finish and the lecture-free time will start. There are still things to do, but at least I can concentrate to what I need to do. It's been a busy semester. The biggest task for me has been to learn the basics of a new programming language, Processing. Before the semester started I didn't even know it was a programming language, but now I've grown to be a decent newbie with it. :) It actually is quite a lot of fun!

I've needed to use Processing with both of my main creative courses, so I've got a good start of learning it. My bigger project is still a bit in the middle, but another course I took is about coding handicrafts. That means, investigating the process of planning handicrafts through the eyes of computing. (Yeah, pretty cool, eh?) If you want to see what are some of the things we've gone through, or especially if you interested in a plethora of great links, take a look at the Github page for our course. Our teacher is pretty thorough and keen about this thing, so if you check the Tools-folder you will find lots of inspirational links about this subject.

Here are a couple of things I've done so far for the course. The first one came to my mind when I was in Berlin for Kraftwerk's "Katalog" shows. After listening to Radioactivity for 8 times in 8 days I couldn't shake the morse code they are playing in the beginning of the song. (I don't mind, it's my favourite from them anyway.) So, I quickly designed and realised this bookmark / necklace / whatever.

Radioactivity morsecode bookmark

We also needed to play with Pa++ern, which our teacher had coded into a Processing programme. We needed to code our initials into the programme and use it to create some real work. I kinda left it into something really simple, since I just liked how it looked like with the initials, and then I made this small pouch for myself. It just lacks a suitable chain, but when I get one I can use it as a party bag. How nice. :)

Eka pouch