Rijnieks - Cinder: begin creative coding

Krisjanis Rijnieks is a new media professional with a background in painting and multimedia. He holds a BA in painting, and parallel to his painting studies he has been doing a lot of things related to print, video, web, flash, Flash coding, and coding in general. It is not possible to name all the different categories of work but through all this a strong interest towards interactive digital media has been developed.

Creative coding is a new field that brings the art and design fields much closer to the one which is called coding. As he has been doing things on both sides, the combination of the two seemed natural. It is a way of using ones creative visual and logical skills together without worrying that an unsolvable conflict between the left and right side of the brain will occur.

For the past two years, he has been involved in many projects that include creative coding with technologies such as Flash ActionScript, openFrameworks, Cinder, iOS, Unity 3D, Kinect, Augmented Reality, Quartz Composer, VDMX, and projection mapping with MadMapper. Experience gathered through these projects required him to search for new and more powerful tools and skills constantly. Cinder is one of the tools that allows one to combine the hottest topics of todays computer science (computer vision, gesture recognition, and so on) with the craziest ideas and make them work in real time without acceleration lags.

Currently he is studying the New Media MA program at the Aalto University School of Art, Design, and Architecture, also known as the Helsinki Media Lab in Finland. He also does freelancing of commercial projects and is making his first entrepreneurial steps by managing his company called Skematic.

This is the very first book that he has written, and according to him it was fun and rewarding in terms of knowledge and experience.

First, I would like to thank Packt Publishing and the people behind it for the offer to author this book. To Irina Spicaka for being patient and supportive while writing. Huge respect to Reinis Adovics for being a mad scientist, living the dream of the creative coder through his own company Warp, and for agreeing to be the technical reviewer of this title. Finally I would like to thank Nuno Correia (Lecturer and Researcher of the SOPI Research Group at the Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture) for the tips and possibility to combine this with my studies, and the whole Helsinki Media Lab students and crew for showing their interest towards this topic.

Reinis Adovis holds a masters degree in architecture. Although the thesis was on urban planning he also studied algorithmic architecture parametric, cybernetic design, morphodynamics, biomimetics, digital prototyping, and production. Implementing ideas in the latter was made easier due to the in-depth knowledge and lifelong love for mathematics, exact sciences (he has also got a background in civil engineering), and programming experience.

Therefore the field of creative coding emerged naturally, it is a result of morphing both expressions humanities and mathematics. But mostly he sees no difference between the two.

Before using code for visualization, he started scripting in the school years in order to organize everyday work more effectively, continued by client-server side utilities in different languages, and more serious apps written in C, C++, and Objective-C. Since then he has touched many coding tools for various purposes.

The first creative coding toolsets he used were Processing (Java) and Quartz Composer. As datasets grew he made the first switch to openFrameworks (C/C++/GLSL). And lately he made the second onethe tool of choice for new projects is Cinder.

He focuses on real-time responsive solutionsphysical computing and interactive installations. Currently he is also exploring audio and space reactive VJ-ing.

I would like to thank the open hardware and software community for the vast knowledge provided that knows no boundaries between the phenomena shaping the world around us. And special thanks to coffee and cigarettes; those things ain't healthy though.

Nikolas is a hybrid of a developer, maker, and artist. He holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Kent (UK), an MSc by research in Physics from the same university, and is a recent alumni of the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

He has worked on interactive projects for Potion (NYC), Pentagram (NYC), FH-Salzburg (AT), Arc Worldwide (GR), and has also taught a Masters level Introduction to Physical Computing course (AT).

His personal projects have been featured at the Come Out and Play Festival 2010 (NYC), the Vimeo Festival and Awards 2010 (NYC), the ITP shows 2009, 2010 (NYC), the 3rd Ward Show 2010 (NYC), the Schmiede Festival 2012 (AT), the Core77 online design gallery, the Engadget and Adafruit websites.

With his work, he is exploring the intersection of art and technology, and aims to push the boundaries between the digital and physical world.

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