A SkillsCast for this session is not available.
James has a lot of experience as a developer, algorithmic artist and academic - and this has led him to think critically about the existing web-based algorithmic art frameworks.
As a beginner, frameworks like Processing and p5js are very easy to get started with. As you gain experience you start to run into issues that are rooted in how those frameworks were designed.
Solandra aims to improve on these issues, starting with clear design principles. For example, three things it does differently to most frameworks (e.g. Processing, p5js):
Human friendly APIs: Solandra offers drawing APIs that make sense and that don’t have 6 arbitrarily sequenced number parameters.
Agile, declarative configuration: easy to change your mind and try out different variations.
Control flow on a 2D Canvas is part of the framework: you don’t write a for loop, you write a tiling of the canvas.
You can read more about Solandra and its design philosophy here: ahttps://solandra.netlify.com
We will be learning Solandra by implementing a series of examples from Solomon "Sol" LeWitt ( ahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_LeWitt ). By the end of the tutorial you'll have produced several of your own artworks.
The workshop will assume that you are comfortable with a programming language such as Javascript, Python or Java. Solandra is intentionally not as beginner friendly as something like p5.js but once you get started, you will often be able to do similar things more elegantly with a lot less code.
Please bring a fully-charged laptop with a modern web browser. There is no need to install anything as we'll be working entirely on the web, using Code Sandbox.
You can find over 90 examples of works created with Solandra, including source code, here: ahttps://solandra.netlify.com/main
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:
Thank you to our sponsors and partners
Platinum
Solandra Hands-On Tutorial
James Porter
Software developer and data scientist.