Dr. Woohoo!

Flash on the Beach jumps shores and will land in Miami on April 6-8th, 2009! If you have attended FOTB in the past, you’ll know this is more than a Flash conference – it’s a celebration where art + technology + beyond collide. John Davey, one of the most sincere and sweet guys you’ll ever meet, orchestrates this conference – bringing together a group of inspiring and informative artists, designers and developers. 

For my part, my theme for 2009 will focus on Art + Code + Apparel and what happens when these worlds collide. Here’s an early description of my show-n-tell session:

Art + Code + Apparel
This session, as told through Dr. Woohoo’s recent artwork and experiments, is as much about the latest color and painting applications Woohoo builds (using Flex Builder, Adobe AIR, SwitchBoard, PatchPanel & CSXS, in conjunction with Illustrator, Photoshop & Maya) in order to create the next version of generative art and design for textiles, as it is about his collaboration with the incredible Andy McDonald from the Centre for Advanced Textiles (CAT) at the Glasgow School of Art. In a dramatic shift away from the current mass-merchandise, one-design fits all world; they are plotting a (re)evolution of the textiles & apparel industry - a return to the Service Oriented Architecture of traditional craft production. Using the tools / skills that designers & developers already possess, the platform they are creating will give you the opportunity to construct highly interactive and collaborative experiences that enable users to design, customize and remix their own unique textile products. In challenging the status quo, their vision of a radically de-centralized model flips the economics of mass-production on its head (whilst significantly reducing the environmental impact). It’s an ambitious concept… will it succeed or will it fail? Either way, it’s going to be a fun ride!!! Come along and find out what they are planning.

Continuing on the conference tour, thanks to Daniel Schutzsmith next up is the WDDC, aka Create Chaos ‘08 conference in Orlando, Florida on October 15th at 3:50 pm. With a focus on AIR/SWF Photoshop/Illustrator: What Happens When They Talk? we will explore the creative possibilities of two new tools in addition to the CS4 apps. I will also delve deeper into what the implications are for the textile/apparel, printing and publishing industries when we apply the rules of generative art/design with the tools we’re now able to create – in short, it’s time to redefine how we play this game. I hope to see you there.

It’s hard to believe but it’s time for Flash on the Beach! I’m bringing my daughter this time, so I will only be at the conference for the day of my presentation because she doesn’t want to miss too much school. ;) 

I present on Monday at 11:30 am with a focus on transforming ideas-to-pixels-to-atoms. Following the flow of ideas-to-pixels and how my artwork comes to life on the screen, I will discuss two new Adobe tools that will make driving the CS3 & CS4 Creative Suites (CS) dramatically easier than previous methods. I will also explore automating Maya via code and integrating it with the CS apps. I’ll wrap things up with how-tos on different options for converting your pixels-to-atoms: using innovative printing techniques that allow you to print to any substrate from your inkjet printer, laser cutting/etching and more. 

Hope to see you there. 

Update: As a side note, for my early experiments driving the CS apps via code, I used ExtendScript ToolKit (ESTK) – as simple ExtendScripts (ES) to begin with and then with embedded swfs that could communicate through the ES. When Apple’s Leopard was released, Apple changed how the windows, including the swf palettes, redraw and this made swf palettes unusable in CS3 apps. Luckily, Adobe and specifically Michael Daumling and Bernd Paradies were already working on the follow-up to ESTK. With the merger of Adobe and Macromedia, it made perfect sense to combine some of the great technologies and out of that came Adobe SwitchBoard and PatchPanel. Both are SWC libraries for Flex Builder, the former allows an AIR app to communicate to the target CS app, the latter enables a swf palette/panel to communicate to the host CS app. SwitchBoard is available here and PatchPanel will be released at some point in the not-to-distant future.

I still recommend playing with ESTK because it’s easy to get up and running because the code feels like JavaScript and ActionScript 1 and it’s free if you have any CS3 app installed. Get to know the DOM (eg., in ESTK Help > Adobe Photoshop CS3 Object Library) of the CS app you’re interested in developing for and how to set/get different values, like the name of a layer.

Using ESTK is a simple stepping stone to developing AIR apps with Flex Builder and SwitchBoard – which brings the code up-to-date with current standards, such as strict data types, code hinting, etc. For all of the demos I did that involved AIR apps, I used Flex Builder and SwitchBoard exclusively, including the color apps for In The Mod. 

Hope this helps.

Transforming ideas to pixels to atoms
The only way to allow my artistic vision to take form was to create applications and scripts that could intelligently analyze colors, influence brush strokes by music and other data streams, control the behaviors and the form of the paint influencing the paint from natural dynamics like gravity and wind and shape-shifting the form into unexpected shapes like glass, and then paint it onto the surface or texture map of the digital 3d models.

For the final transition from pixels-to-atoms, the form needed to embrace properties that allowed me to print it in a 2d plane on canvas or laser-cut/etched on acrylic, as well as cnc-milled into a 3d physical model that I could use for casting that would eventually become the glass, ceramic and metal sculptures.

Woohoo’s presentation will explore the process and tools of tranforming ideas-to-pixels-to-atoms as well as the end results. The session is scheduled for September 29th, 11:30am.

Only a few tickets are left and ticket sales will close on Friday, September 5 – you can purchase them here.