The awesomely talented UCLA duo of Casey Reas (1/2 of Processing and come on, he has a 4 letter .com url. This guy is on the ball!), Chandler McWilliams (of The Barbarian Group and general art/philosophy brilliance), and the design/interactive shop LUST have teamed up to create a beautiful and expansive compendium of computational aesthetics. The book, entitled ‘Form + Code’, published by the Princeton Architectural Press, features an impressive collection of work. It is a must have for anyone finding themselves at the crossroads of art and technology. Not only is the book beautifully designed, but it is equally beautifully curated.
The book begins with a brief history of code and then showcases specific examples through the categories of repetition, transformation, parameterization, visualization and stimulation. You will likely see many examples that you recognize and hopefully, just as many which are new to you. I was happy to see ‘The Visual Thesaurus’ because it was the first website which made me see the artistic potential of code despite it being more of a reference site than an art site.
The Form + Code website is a good place to start. You can see some spreads from the book, list of contributors, and a bunch of code examples (written in Processing)… pretty much everything you need to get inspired. Also, check out the more thorough review by Rhizome.org.
The book is available from Amazon.com.
