The EMPAC Field Workshop — Schedule

Friday (completely optional)

Marc's giving a talk at 7pm that night — come to the talk or grab him after it and introduce yourself.

Saturday

9am — Breakfast; Informal introductions

Here we'll do some shared planning for the topics that the rest of the workshop should cover. We're feeling prepared for all kinds of things — but you should be prepared to bring your ideas, projects and problems.

10am — Introduction

A gentle introductory walkthrough of basic Field things; installation, extension and a little 2d drawing. Field's 2d drawing system will be interesting if you are into data visualization, if you come from a fine-arts background or if you just looking for something simple and straight-forward to ground your understanding of programming. If we end up with a majority of Processing users we'll ground our materials in that instead.

12pm — Lunch & installation wrangling

Field has been pretty well behaved recently about installing on people's machines, but we'll nip any installation problems in the bud right here. We're going to have a "beta 10" especially for the event (and I bet we have a beta 11 by the end).

1pm — Interoperability: Java, Processing, OpenCV, Max/MSP

In the afternoon we'll take a closer look at Field's relationship with what are maybe the two dominant digital art platforms — Processing and Max/MSP.

Since we know that there are going to be some serious Processing users attending we'll distribute our tutorial materials and move to discussing, sketching and provoking. Bring your Processing projects; open them up; and we'll reassemble parts of them in Field. For Max/MSP users we'll try to find the tactical interventions that Field can make in that environment and your practice. People who typically come to projects with their own Java code should make sure to bring them here as well. Engineers should be prepared to guide us through the numerical and algorithmic libraries that ground their work — anything Java-based is fair game for the weekend.

There will be a mid-afternoon coffee break.

6pm — Dinner

Optional. 'The after dinner session — talk, hack, show work, debug, debate.

Sunday

9am — Breakfast, Coffee

10am — The Field graphics system

Field comes with it's own OpenGL and GLSLang based graphics system which OpenEnded Group uses to make all of its art. We'll start the day taking a close look at how it's put together and how it relates to and differs from Processing and NodeBox.

1pm — Lunch

2pm — Work session

They don't call it a a workshop for nothing. But we'll also be showing some of the Field elements that we are developing for our current art works, focusing mainly on Upending and Forest.

5pm-ish — Dinner / End of Workshop

Optional. 'Tthe secret stereo after dinner session — Field's graphics system has a secret active-shutter stereo mode. Anything could happen.