Moving Mondrian
An online workshop led by Leen Katrib | Tuesday 4/4 + Tuesday 4/11 | 7-10pm
In the early 20th century, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian produced a series of Compositions through a language of few controlled structural elements: intersecting vertical and horizontal lines of varying thicknesses that define rectilinear spaces that are filled in white and primary colors.
In this workshop, we will challenge the two-dimensional abstraction of Mondrian’s Composition by reconstructing it entirely through another language of structural elements: Processing. Processing is an object-oriented graphics programming language that was launched at MIT Media Lab at the beginning of the 21st century. Conceived as a basic programming language to promote software literacy amongst non-programmers—designers, architects, visual artists, etc.—Processing and its workflows will position us to creatively mis- and re-interpret Mondrian’s two-dimensional Composition to generate new three-dimensional imaginaries.
During the first half of the workshop (April 4) , participants will be exposed to basic graphics programming to learn the workflows for constructing a two-dimensional composition entirely through coding language. During the second half of the workshop (April 11), we will shift to exploring a variety of techniques to translate the constructed two-dimensional composition into a moving and interactive three-dimensional animation grounded in architectural thinking. Throughout the process, we will also explore open-source Processing libraries and tools to complement our constructed code sketchbook.
