Casey Reas — Processing 1.0 / first public release

2001

Artists: Casey Reas, Ben Fry · Year: 2001 · Medium: Programming language and IDE for visual artists · Substrate: Java-based language, integrated editor, open-source · Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · Institution: MIT Media Lab — Aesthetics and Computation Group (John Maeda) Processing began in 2001 as an internal tool at the MIT Media Lab's Aesthetics and Computation Group, John Maeda's group, where Casey Reas and Ben Fry were doctoral students. Maeda's group was designing languages and systems that let artists work with code as a primary medium; Processing was the particular language Reas and Fry built for the task. It was released publicly that year. The 1.0 stable version followed in 2008. What Processing did, that nothing before it had done well, was make programming immediately accessible to a person whose first interest was making images. Its sketch structure — setup() and draw() functions, a canvas, a handful of drawing primitives — hides the Java infrastructure beneath it. You write six lines of code and you see a shape on the screen. You write twelve lines and the shape is animated. The cognitive overhead a person used to taking up a new medium — learning a new tool — is compressed to the minimum possible. The consequence is that Processing became the first programming language for nearly every artist who learned to code from 2001 onward. It is the lingua franca of creative-coding pedagogy. Its syntax is the starting syntax. Its conventions — the coordinate system, the naming of drawing functions, the sketch structure — have been copied into p5.js (the JavaScript port), into openFrameworks (the C++ cousin), and into the teaching languages used in every MFA program with a digital-media component. The aesthetic and political consequences are larger than the language. Reas and Fry built Processing as free software, released under the LGPL. They chose, deliberately, to put a capable visual-programming environment in the hands of anyone who wanted one, rather than selling it. The generative-art movement that emerged in the 2010s — the entire Art Blocks and fxhash era — runs, at the code level, on languages that descend directly from Processing. The economic enclosure of that downstream culture is in a specific and uncomfortable tension with the upstream decision that made it possible. Reas and Fry are both still working. Both have pursued adjacent practices — Reas through Feral File, Fry through Fathom Information Design. Processing is still in active development. Lore Reas and Fry were both graduate students under John Maeda at MIT's Aesthetics and Computation Group. Processing began as an internal teaching tool — a way to get artists into code without forcing them through an industrial Java IDE — and was opened to the public in 2001. The 1.0 stable release in 2008 hardened it into the lingua franca of creative coding; Processing and its port p5.js remain, twenty-five years later, the default first language for almost every art-school student who works with code. Reas went on to co-found Feral File. Fry founded Fathom Information Design. Maeda moved between MIT, RISD, and industry. The genealogy from Maeda's group to Art Blocks runs straight through this release. Sources • Reas, Casey & Fry, Ben — Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (MIT Press, 2007) • processing.org • MIT Media Lab — Aesthetics and Computation Group archives