Processing for Professionals

In 2012, my career as a web and app developer began shifting to full-time interactive installation development. For over a decade, Processing was my main tool for creating high-visibility commercial projects for clients like Nike and Google, and for my own art projects and collaborations shown at the Smithsonian Institution, Meow Wolf, and the Denver Art Museum. While most of my peers moved on to "more powerful" tools like Cinder, openFrameworks, and TouchDesigner, I kept pushing Processing far beyond what many assumed was possible. I rolled my learnings and techniques into Haxademic, my own Java framework, which extended Processing's core functions and gave me superpowers in my work. As an outlier in my profession and the Processing community, I'd love to share a little history, some projects, and publicly declare my love for Processing, which helped me build an extremely fortunate and unique creative career. I use Processing less often these days, but I still reach for it, and I also use p5.js to teach a master's-level Creative Coding course at CU Boulder's ATLAS Institute. I currently reside on the North Shore of Boston.

Haxademic is my personal Processing-based creative coding toolkit, built to run in Eclipse with Java and the latest version of Processing. It's a starting point for interactive visuals, installations, rendering and writing Processing "sketches" in a more robust environment. It loads a bunch of useful Java/Processing libraries and contains a ton of other useful tools that I've written.

About the presenter

Justin Gitlin is the Technical Director at Hovercraft Studio, where he leads the engineering of design-forward interactive digital projects. With a practice spanning three decades as a creative coder, digital artist, and musician, he has launched hundreds of interactive installations, video games, and experimental web experiences for partners ranging from Nike and Google to the Smithsonian and Meow Wolf. Justin specializes in translating creative visions into robust and emotive digital systems, bridging the gaps between creative direction, software architecture, hardware integration, and user experience design.

Installations Haxademic on GitHub cacheflowe.com Instagram @cacheflowe