Solandra Hands-On Tutorial & Emergent Behaviour In Insects

This extended meetup has two main features:

• Tutorial on Solandra - a simple, modern TypeScript-first algorithmic art tool - James Porter

• Talk on Emergent Behaviour In Insects - Alison Rice

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We've very lucky to have James Porter introducing and leading a hands-on tutorial on Solandra, a new open source framework for algorithmic art, powered by HTML Canvas.

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: https://solandra.netlify.com

We will be learning Solandra by implementing a series of examples from Solomon "Sol" LeWitt ( https://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: https://solandra.netlify.com/main

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We're also very lucky to have Alison Rice, accomplished in psychology and horticultural therapy. Her special interest in vermiculture and biodiversity led her to the innovation of sustainable upcycling and production methods using biomimetic principles.

She will give a short talk on the fascinating subject of insect psychology and how it leads to sophisticated emergent group behaviour - a theme many algorithmic artists have taken inspiration from.

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Please sign up on the skillsmatter page too:
https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/13012-solandra-hands-on-tutorial-and-emergent-behaviour-in-insects

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This is an extended meetup so please arrive in time for a 6.30pm start. Alison's talk will be from 6.30 to 7.00pm, and Jame's tutorial will be from 7.00 to 8.30pm.