I’ll be doing a two hour workshop in Boston on Processing for a conference on graphic design in education. My goal: get a group of educators and students unfamiliar with the tool up to speed as quickly as possible. I’m assembling a “90-minute” Processing code kit for the purpose, indebted to some of the existing examples but adapted to teaching; I’ll be open sourcing that on CDM Labs and certainly welcome input. (Stay tuned — and any of you other Processing folk out there had to do something like this? Ben Fry has a folder of code he uses, I know; Dan Shiffman has gobs of great stuff but it assumes a timeframe more like a semester.)

I’m really excited about the conference itself. There’s unfortunately far too little real focus on how media impacts teaching, and that’s exactly what this event addresses:

Massaging Media 2: Graphic Design Education in the Age of Dynamic Media conference will gather a diverse group of presenters and attendees from around the world for a provocative conversation on how graphic design education is being affected by dynamic media.

Through keynote presentations, panel discussions, multiple-track speaker sessions, a working lunch, and a breakfast roundtable, we will focus our discussion on five key subject areas: pedagogy; practice; theory; future history; and making it work.

In the lineup: designers of the future, kinetic typography, algorithmic design and open code, motion literacy (which unfortunately I think does NOT mean how many people are subscribed to our RSS, but hey), fluid, dynamic design, and naturally lots on pedagogy.

And I absolutely have to catch up Kyle Buza, who gave us the mmonoplayer Max 8-bit externals.

If you’re a student, you can attend the conference for as little as US$75; for everyone else you can register online for US$225 even without a membership in the AIGA, the sponsoring organization. And if you come, do say hi!

massagingmedia2

I’m boarding a Greyhound bus for Boston and the Ideas in Motion weekend of Boston Cyberarts, two packed days of events on dance, motion, interactive technology, artificial intelligence, and augmented bodies:

Boston Cyberarts Festival 2007 - Ideas in Motion: The Body’s Limit

If you’re in Boston, stop by and see us! I’ve been preparing two works — creating digital music and digital motion in each, if you will. Palinopsia at 2pm Saturday is my own work with choreographer Elise Knudson and dancer Pauliina Silvennoinen, for which I’ve done a music score and live visuals in Jitter (some infrared, as seen above). Take a Seat is Andrea Haenggi’s work in a conference room of the SHARE Swiss Consulate 11am Sunday, at which I’ll be mixing live sounds in Ableton Live and built an interactive barcode scanner that sends barcode-label messages to the dancers.

And of course the whole weekend is packed with dances and lectures and other good stuff. If you’re there, do introduce yourselves. If not, I hope to report back next week.

(I sometimes feel like I hit the body’s limit on a regular basis, but I’m a weakling who doesn’t respond well to stress.)