In this five-day course, I was introduced to Processing and was taught to use it to represent living systems in a visually compelling manner.

The final assignment was to draw inspiration from a natural phenomenon and transform this digitally using code. While exploring various natural phenomenon, I became intrigued by the channels bridging us and nature - the eyes. With that, I began to investigate vision and perception, and found out differences in vision of man and animals. In particular, horses’ wide set eyes prevent them from seeing objects directly in front of them, resulting in a gap in their visual field. Cats see less clearly, perceive a limited range of colours with green being one of the colours that appear vibrant.

My processing sketch is a digital representation of how we see the world vis-a-vis horses and cats. The viewer can adopt the first person view via the sketch - by looking through the pinhole, panning the landscape and blinking by moving the mouse and clicking. The pinhole effect was created on a separate canvas (pgCanvas) and the panning effect was made possible by hiding a larger image under that canvas. In addition, the viewer can also switch between the vision of man, horse and cat via mouse clicks and key presses. The horse’s gap in visual field was a black object and the cat’s vision was emulated using a filter.

Without any prior experience with programming or Processing, the course was challenging and rewarding. By focusing on my personal learning objectives and the key aspects of vision that I wanted to represent, I was able to acquire the basics and visualize the differences between how we and animals see the world. The sketch was created and refined over the last two days of the course.