Casey Reas — Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists

2007

Artists: Casey Reas, Ben Fry · Year: 2007 · Medium: Published book — canonical Processing textbook · Substrate: MIT Press hardcover, 736 pages with extensive code examples and visual references · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA / Los Angeles, USA · Institution: MIT Press Casey Reas and Ben Fry published Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists through MIT Press in 2007. The book was 700 pages long, bound in a sturdy dark-blue cloth case, and organized as a complete self-study textbook on the Processing programming language — the open-source visual-programming environment that Reas and Fry had first released in 2001. The book explained Processing from zero: no programming background assumed, no mathematics background assumed, every example illustrated with the small working program that produced it. It worked. Within a decade of publication, the Processing handbook had become the de facto introductory text for every undergraduate art-and-computation course in North America and a substantial portion of them in Europe and Asia. Every major art school — RISD, Parsons, CalArts, the Royal College, UCLA — built Processing into their media curriculum partly because the book existed. The second edition (2014) and the short-form Getting Started with Processing (2010, with Joshua Noble and others) extended the pedagogical reach further. What made the book unusually consequential is less the language itself (Processing is a reasonably straightforward Java simplification) than the pedagogical stance embedded in the writing. Reas and Fry had decided, at every fork in the authorial road, to prefer the interpretation of programming as a visual craft rather than as a technical discipline. The book's examples are almost all about drawing. The book's structure follows the order in which a visual artist would learn — lines, shapes, color, motion, interaction — rather than the order in which a computer scientist would teach them. This was a deliberate political stance. It said to a generation of design and art students: you can learn this, it is your craft. The book is in this archive because it did for the 2007–2020 generation of digital artists what, in an earlier era, Ken Knowlton's EXPLOR language had done for Schwartz at Bell Labs: it made the computational medium accessible without requiring the student to pass through a computer-science filter. Without the Processing book, the 2010s generational wave of generative artists — Tyler Hobbs, Jared Tarbell, Zach Lieberman, Kyle McDonald, and dozens of others in this archive — would not have had the pedagogical infrastructure to emerge when they did. Reas and Fry remain the principal stewards of Processing. The language is in its fourth major version; the book is still in print. Lore Reas and Fry co-wrote the book over approximately three years, splitting chapters roughly evenly and trading drafts by email from their respective studios (Reas in Los Angeles, Fry in Boston). They have said in subsequent interviews that the editorial process at MIT Press was unusual: the press allowed them full control over the book's visual design, which is substantial and distinctive (the book is itself a design object, with careful color use and original typography). The 2007 first printing sold out in weeks. Reas and Fry have continued to resist every commercial pressure to make Processing proprietary or to accept licensing arrangements that would have limited its free availability. The language remains entirely open-source under the LGPL. Both maintain academic appointments — Reas at UCLA Design Media Arts, Fry at the Broad Institute's visualization group — but both still code regularly and still respond to Processing-community questions on the language's forums. Sources • Reas, Casey; Fry, Ben — Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (MIT Press, 2007; rev. ed. 2014). • Processing Foundation — processing.org (language site). • Reas, Casey — reas.com (artist archive).