At ITP, Room 447

“We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.”
– Paul Graham

Ruby-Processing should be more like making conversation with that itinerant uncle of yours who’s heavy into mind-expanding substances and over whom the laws of physics and thermodynamics seem to have little or no control. Ruby is a *very* flexible and *very* loose language. Like Godzilla, it came from Japan — and lets you do dangerous things like redefining portions of core classes and adding methods to objects on the fly, should you choose to walk that path. For the live performers and code slingers, it lets you mess with your sketches as they run. For the language lovers and grammarians out there, it allows you to create and code with specialized pidgins, tailor-made to your Processing problem. Appetite whet yet? Come to the talk equipped with ideas about how to best gussy up our art-making code tools.

Bio:

Jeremy Ashkenas is an ex-student, recently arrived in New York City. He started working on Ruby-Processing a year ago, in order to try and ease some rough edges with a Processing-only course. He has a BA from Brown University in “Literary Systems”, or the idea that all of our writing practices (essays, novels, theorems, code) have the potential to approach literature as they begin to build up referential systems of meaning. Jeremy was born and raised in Berkeley, California.