A Processing Primer for Artists Susan Reiser UNC Asheville reiser@unca.edu Phill Conrad UC Santa Barbara pconrad@cs.ucsb.edu Figure 1: Processing output. ABSTRACT Processing is an open source programming language and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) developed by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. This workshop is a hand-on programming primer for artists and designers who are interested in using programming and computational thinking as creative tools. CCS CONCEPTS · Applied computing → Media arts; · Social and professional topics → Computing literacy; · Software and its engineering → Control structures; Data types and structures; Syntax; KEYWORDS computer graphics programming, computing in the arts, processing ACM Reference format: Susan Reiser and Phill Conrad. 2017. A Processing Primer for Artists. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’17 Studio, Los Angeles, CA, USA, July 30 - August 03, 2017, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3084863.3107579 1 OVERVIEW AND BACKGROUND Susan Reiser and Phill Conrad, both experienced Processing in- structors, will introduce computer programming with Processing, a language that was honored with a Golden Nica award at the Arts Electronica 2005 festival. Participants will learn enough program- ming - see Section 2 - to build a simple animation with user inter- action by the end of the one-and-a-half-hour session. Those who wish to use their own laptops instead of the studio desktops should download and install Processing from the processing.org [Process- ing 2017] website prior to the workshop. Unfortunately, facilitators will not have time to oversee custom installations during the ses- sion. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). SIGGRAPH ’17 Studio, July 30 - August 03, 2017, Los Angeles, CA, USA © 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5009-9/17/07. https://doi.org/10.1145/3084863.3107579 The benefts of Processing are numerous. Four important benefts are 1) a simple and elegant interface called the Processing Develop- ment Environment (PDE) shown in Figure 1; 2) support for 2D, 3D, and pdf output; 3) an active community of developers who have extended its capabilities with many custom libraries; and 4) it is free. With many languages, programming instruction must follow te- dious instruction on how to use the development environment. Not so with Processing. Its interface is intuitive and allows beginning programmers to start programming and producing visual output immediately. It natively supports 2D, 3D and vector graphics; and RGBA and HSBA color models. Standard libraries support video, sound, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi. Custom libraries developed by the Processing community support myriad other features. 2 WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES (1) Drawing with code using graphics primitives (2) Data types (3) Variables (4) Conditional expressions (5) Loops (6) Animation (7) User interaction (8) Events 3 FUTURE WORK After the workshop, the facilitators hope that attendees will want to delve deeper into Processing and computer programming. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This material is partially based upon work supported by the Na- tional Science Foundation under grant No. 1323610, Computing in the Arts. BIOGRAPHIES Phill Conrad is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, with a joint appointment in the Com- puting program of the College of Creative Studies. His appointment is as a Lecturer (SOE), a career oriented teaching faculty rank that corresponds to a tenured associate professor. Prior to joining the UCSB faculty in 2008, he chaired the Interactive Media Minor at