Adobe's Project Para: Where Art Meets Programming
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Artists’ tools have traditionally been defined by the familiar: a paintbrush, paint, a potters wheel, a camera, etc. Over time, with the advent of the technology, we’ve seen a transformation of art to a digital form.
A video projection artist like France’s Olivier Crouzel uses technology to create his art. Crouzel uses the world around him as a studio – moving from location to location, taking in all the sights and sounds of the environment with a camera or smart phone. He attributes meaning to each image and then heads back into the studio to his computer.
Crouzel cross pollinates the images he captured and uses software tools to bring those images to life. Through a combination of math and geometry, photography, video projection equipment and a smart phone, he’s able to scale his art to fit the exact proportions of the structure he’s projecting onto.
Crouzel is part of the booming and profitable creative industry inEurope. France has the highest value add to their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the creative industries, 3.4 percent, followed by the UK, Norway, Finland and Denmark.
Three-quarters of Europe’s total creative industries turnover is generated France, UK, Germany, Italy and Spain, the five largest EU members. France has the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the creative industries followed by the UK, Norway, Finland and Denmark.
In the UK alone, the creative industries were worth £76.9 billion to the UK economy in 2013.
Which brings us to tools for creation in the digital age. With what seems to be an endless stream of mandates for the benefits of learning to code, Adobe took a different approach.
Through a collaboration with Massachusetts of Technology (MIT)Media Lab, Adobe created Project Para to give digital artists the ability to create complex parametric designs without having to master textual programming, formal math or geometry.
Jennifer Jacobs has a degree in Fine Arts but is also a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab and an intern in the Adobe Creative Technologies Lab. She’s a self-proclaimed artist turned programmer. Jacobs said she recognized that artists were using programming to create interactive behaviors in their work, but were also using it as tool for drawing. At the same time she said artists were struggling to learn programming and apply it to their work.
“Programming can help artist explore variations on their ideas,” said Jacobs in a presentation of Para at Adobe MAX 2014. “The problem is that programming tools and languages are different than the direct manipulation environments artists use and are comfortable with.”
Para looks like a vector drawing application (Bezier forms, shapes), but the power lies in the basics of programming – it helps artists create complexity in their illustrations easily and in real time without the need to code or know programming and explore multiple designs in a single canvas.
“Para gives artists access to computational abstractions and the ability to create really complex designs and illustrations out of a single basic artistic form ,” Jacobs adds. “It allows the artist to think about drawing something not just as a single piece, but as a system of possibilities.”
Adobe has opened up Para to anyone who wants to test it at Paradrawing.com and because it’s open source software it gives the community a chance to contribute to it’s refinement.
“Allowing our tools to bear the brunt of complex mathematical functions unlocks a world of opportunity for those with a creative vision who may not have these formal abilities,” said Guy Armitage, founder of Zealous and online art community that matches artists with businesses and other opportunities. “ Our future depends on delegating to machines, what machines do best and work to our strengths as humans, our ability to create. I can’t wait to see what come out of Project Para.”