concept processing in category generative art

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Generative Art. Login to get full access to this book.

Figure 2.1. Processing.org: an invaluable resource for tutorials, reference, and discourse. It’s also the place to download the latest version of Processing.

Processing, as you’ve discovered, is based on Java. Most modern mobile phones run Java. Does this mean you can create mobile-phone applications in Processing? The answer is yes. Kinda.

If you wish to develop for devices that use Google’s Android operating system, it couldn’t be simpler. Processing enables you to publish sketches to an Android emulator or an attached device as easily as you can export them to the desktop. The 1.5 release of the Processing IDE added a new button to the toolbar, which toggles the view between “Standard” and “Android”. If you select Android Mode, the run and export functionality will be overridden to target a device. You will need to have the Android SDK installed on your machine to use this though. Full instructions on how to set this up are at http://wiki.processing.org/w/Android. There are also two great tutorials on creativeapplications.net that talk through the creation of your first Android app^[2] and publishing it for the Android Market^[3], by Jer Thorp and Jerome Saint-Clair respectively.

Almost all programming languages include a function equivalent to Processing’s random function, but returning a truly random number is an impossibility for a predictable machine. Computer-generated randomness is always pseudo-random, using mathematical formulae, often including a reference to the machine’s internal clock as one of its factors to ensure that no two calculations give the same result. The formulae behind these functions are an art in themselves, but you need only trust that a returned random value will be good enough to fool us dumb humans.