I remember this recitation being one of my favorites over the course of the semester. I had never heard of Processing before that day, and was surprised to find out how enjoyable this sort of implementation of coding skills could be. I saw (and still) the process as almost “code-based art,” where physical performance and artistic swift-handedness matter significantly less than they would if we were painting on canvass or sculpting clay with our hands. While coding pictures and art through Processing does not produce a tangible work, the idea that virtually anyone can create a digitized artistic piece based on their own vision by essentially learning a second language opens a lot of doors to the physically disabled or others without the means to make physical art.
For this recitation, I chose to attempt to recreate the simplest and most straightforward (or so I thought) sketch possible to code in processing:
While on paper, both literally and figuratively, this dinosaur would be pretty easy to draw, I quickly became aware that certain aspects of a sketch commonly presumed to be “simple” may prove challenging to recreate in Processing code. For example, when trying to draw the dinosaur in question, basically any able-bodied and minded person over the age of 3 could fairly intuitively mimic the general shape of the body, the basic details in the eyes and scales, etc. and produce a completed rendition in under three minutes. Due to the nature of Processing, this simple task became exponentially more involved and daunting after I did a rough estimate of the number of functions necessary to produce something even remotely similar. I spent the bulk of the recitation trying to figure out outcomes from different orders of code, and generally how to produce, not necessarily the picture, but the shapes I needed to form a coherent sketch. In this way, Processing is interesting because it forces the coder to more deeply consider otherwise unhelpful details like the precise curvature of the dinosaur’s back, or the height of the top of the head relative to that of the end of its tail. I appreciated how in this recitation, we got an opportunity to view “simple” drawings as complex or simple depending on how one would define these two words, by considering art through a different lens.