Ben Fry Workshop

Darklight are excited and delighted to welcome celebrated, artist, information designer and programmer Ben Fry to the festival this year. Ben will be demonstrating Processing software which he developed with Casey Reas of UCLA. This will be followed by a screening of some projects made using Processing. There will also be a round table discussion on Saturday afternoon with Dennis Mc Nulty in the Darklight Salon. Processing is an Open Source environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive media software. In 2006, Fry was named a Rockefeller New Media Fellow for his work and last year Processing picked up both the Goldene Nica at Prix Ars Electronica and the prize for Interactive Design at Tokyo TDC.

Benjamin Fry completed his doctoral degree at the MIT Media Laboratory in 2004. His research focuses on methods of visualizing large amounts of data from dynamic information sources. His dissertation, titled "Computational Information Design," examines how to combine disparate fields such as Computer Science, Statistics, Graphic Design, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data.   At MIT, Ben was a member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group. He received an undergraduate degree from the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University , with a major in Graphic Design and a minor in Computer Science. For the 2006-07 school year, Ben will return to his alma mater to teach as the Nierenberg Chair of Design. In addition to his academic work, he spent time as a designer and programmer at Netscape. He was named in the "The I.D. Forty: Forty Designers Under 30 Years of Age" by I.D. Magazine and his work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2002 and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003.   Other work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York , at Ars Electronica in Linz , Austria and in the films "Minority Report" and "The Hulk". 

www.processing.org Dennis McNulty is an artist/musician based in Dublin , Ireland . His current practice includes site-specific sound-performances, concerts of improvised music, soundtrack composition and video work.

www.dennismcnulty.com