Kyle Chayka writingin the Creators Project:
If you’ve seen an unbelievable interactive projection or a mind-blowing piece of generative video art, odds are you’ve come across openFrameworks, an accessible programming platform that has helped create projects like Arturo Castro and Kyle McDonald’s Faces, a real-time face-substitution project, the EyeWriter graffiti headset from F.A.T. Labs, and Chris O’Shea’s playful, Monty Python-inspired Hand from Above, among many other works of technology-based art. What makes openFrameworks and similar coding tools like Processing so powerful in an artistic context is that they are open source, free for any artist to use and hack to their own ends, and are made by artists, for artists.“Open source is about sharing your process,” Kyle McDonald, an artist who has worked with openFrameworks since 2008 and now contributes to its core code, wrote in an email. “That could mean explaining how you mix your paint, writing out your 12-tone row, or posting your code.” This open, democratic philosophy immediately separates technology-based art from the greater art world, where secrecy is a byword and the last thing commercial galleries want to do is show how their sausage gets made. But what if open source ideology could disrupt (in the start-up sense) the confines of the contemporary art scene? Everything would change, from the solitary nature of art making to the lack of support infrastructure for artists and the entrenched gallery economy...[continue reading]
Golan Levin and Kyle McDonald, Rectified Flowers.
