2017 CAST Symposium BEING MATERIAL: Ben Fry and Casey Reas, PROGRAMMABLE

Ben Fry is principal of Fathom Information Design, a design and software consultancy located in Boston. He received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edythe L. Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. At the end of 2007, he finished writing Visualizing Data for O’Reilly. In 2011, he won the National Design Award for Interaction Design from the Cooper-Hewitt.
Casey Reas is a computational artist and co-developer of Processing, a programming language geared towards the visual arts. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences as well as a bachelor’s degree from the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing in 2001. Processing is an open source programming language and environment for the visual arts.
BEING MATERIAL:
In 1995, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted that “being digital” would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy materiality persists and even reasserts itself. Programmable matter, self-assembling structures, 3D/4D printing, wearable technologies and bio-inspired design today capture the attention of engineers, scientists and artists. “BEING MATERIAL” showcased recent developments in materials systems and design, placing this work in dialogue with kindred and contrasting philosophy, art practice and critique. Panels on the PROGRAMMABLE, WEARABLE, LIVABLE and INVISIBLE-along with a concert, AUDIBLE-explored new and unexpected meetings of the digital and material worlds.
PROGRAMMABLE:
To program something is to impart a set of executable instructions into a medium to perform that process. From Ada Lovelace’s first hand-written program to today’s algorithmically animated robots, clothing, and living material, programmability has expanded its purview to embrace everything from the digital to the physical, from the synthetic to the biological, and from the scientific to the artistic. How have ideas about creativity, craft, and matter transformed in the process? What novel science and art emerges when material becomes programmable?

[@SymphonyKol_androidLover]

Awesome work you have done guys, thank you 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

[@amirkahinpour547]

Wooowwwww. 3D printed record. That was absolutely awesome. Thank you for sharing

[@yulbs]

why did the video go completely black over time though?

[@diseno2040]

Around min 5 Casey and around min 19 Ben both implicitly refer to John Maeda and Seymour Papert's seminal ideas. Was expecting them to make this explicit... An interesting talk but feel disappointed that they fail to acknowledge these prior ideas.