Casey Reas and Ben Fry Initiate Processing Project

Perhaps important enough for the name of the entire decade, Processing is that important to the development of generative art. It will have to suffice to have heavily inspired the decade’s title, which, to be fair, does include other tooling breakthroughs such as Zach Lieberman’s openFrameworks.

Created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry at MIT’s ACG under John Maeda, Processing changed generative art irrevocably. It educated and inspired a new generation of artist-coders, expanding generative art’s talent pool exponentially.

Artist and digital researcher Karsten Schmidt recently shared with the author Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about the importance of Processing as an open-source tool. As such, it adhered to decades of anti-commercial, open-sharing and communal learning sentiment from the computation community, with ideals dating back to the humanist thought of Ivan Illich. Prior to this, educational institutions and artists had to pay for the latest version of commercial software, such as Macromedia’s Director. Processing gave artists not only greater control of their work but was also free to use and was continuously updated by the community, relying on the incredibly dedicated work of Project Leads Ben Fry and Casey Reas as well as dozens of other contributors and alumni that have made it all possible and deserve tremendous credit.

Golan Levin spoke to me about Processing as a response to the commercially available tools at the time: “Processing in its full-flowered implementation was a reaction to the limits of Flash and Director in terms of the assumptions that they made about artist tooling. What Ben and Casey knew was that the computer was capable of vastly more than Adobe would lead you to believe in terms of the flexibility and malleability of dynamic digital form. ‍‍‍They showed that you could actually control the individual vertices of a polygon. You don’t just have to be stuck with ellipses and rectangles. That’s why Ben and Casey made that a first-order feature in Processing.

As for the moment itself, the site www.proce55ing.net went live on October 20, 2001 with some sparse examples and the following description:

“Proce55ing is an environment for programming images, movement, and interaction. It is a sketchbook for developing ideas, a tool for creating prototypes, and a context for learning the fundamentals of computer programming. The Pr0cess1ng environment is in its early stages and will continue to develop.Pr()ce55ing is written in Java and enables the creation of Java Applications and Applets within a carefully designed set of constraints. It uses a 2D/3D Java rendering API that is a cross between postscript-style imaging in 2D and 3D rendering with OpenGL.”

Processing continues to be an essential tool for many creative coders, artists and students. Beyond being an invaluable tool across classrooms worldwide teaching creative coding to the newest generation of artists and designers, Processing offers a way for illustrious artists with careers measured in the decades to continue their practice.

Frieder Nake, the icon, one of the earliest computer and digital artists, spoke to me about Processing in 2024, saying:

“I have for the last 15 years—maybe more—used Processing. Now, Casey Reas, one of the two founders, it’s so fantastic that he himself is an artist. Ben Fry, his friend, the two did it at MIT. They were still students when they did this. So the fact that here an artist, who was an artist before he was using computers, designed together with his friend, that programming language, that’s a historic fact that the world should really become aware of. And to use Processing is really simple. Ever since, I’ve never taught anything else to my students. Processing, it is so powerful because it’s based on Java. But you don’t have to know Java.”