Musecon 2012 Convention – Itasca, IL

Musecon, a convention in northeastern Illinois that celebrates music and the creative arts opens this Friday August 3 and runs through Sunday August 5. Musecon's programming consists of a weekend of classes and hands-on workshops on all things creative. Musecon is being held at the Westin Chicago Northwest in Itasca, IL. For complete information and to register, see www.musecon.org. The convention Guest of Honor is Gregg Taylor of Decoder Ring Theatre. The special guests that I am most looking forward to are the Masters of Lightning and their Musical Tesla Coils! This is a great show.

This year I will be giving two presentations for Musecon. One is an introduction to the Processing programming language and the other is an attempt to summarize the myriad of issues facing artists and photographers who are seeking to use the Internet to build their business. Following is the information on my two talks.

Title:	Building an Online Presence: The Internet for Artists and Photographers
Objective:	To provide artists and photographers an introduction to establishing a presence on the Internet in order to market and sell their art. For more information about this presentation, see Building an Online Presence: The Internet for Artists and Photographers
When:	Friday 9:00 PM – 10:15 PM

Title:	Processing for Artists and Photographers
Objective:	To provide an introduction to the Processing programming language and development environment This is an updated version of the presentation that I gave at last year's Musecon. For more information about this presentation, see Processing for Artists and Photographers
When:	Saturday 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM

In addition to presenting, there are several programs that I am looking forward to attending. On my list to attend are:

• 3D Printing Discussion
• Arduino for Absolute Beginners
• Build a Catapult (because you never known when you'll need to defend your home)
• Digital Photo Terminology & Equipment
• f-Stop, Shutter Speed, & Focal Length – Better Photography With Your Old School Film Camera
• Hackerspaces & Makerspaces
• Studio Lighting Use in Photography
• Tesla Coils!

Of special interest to me personally is Arduino for Absolute Beginners hosted by Workshop 88. I have an Arduino but have done very little with it. In fact I only assembled it to the point of being able to hook it up to my laptop and confirm that I could control it via a Processing program I had written.

One program I would like to attend but can't since it is opposite one of my own presentations is Creative Cover Art: Contortionists Preferred. If you are curious about what other programs are being offered at Musecon, visit the
Musecon Programming Guide.

Here's to a weekend of education and fun at Musecon.

The Illustration: Experimental Self Portrait

To illustrate this post I choose a self-portrait that I had taken in a mirror with a small pocket camera. The purpose was simply to have a photograph that I could use to test out an image processing routine that I was developing using the Processing programming language. The program takes as input a photograph and produces a new version of the picture by applying a distortion based on the brightness level of the pixels in the image. Using Processing to perform image processsing tasks is one of the topics I touch on in my presentation.

Ad Astra, Jim

| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2012 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Presentations, Processing.