Night City Ride

Some months ago I took part of an event called Programa La Plaza, it is organized every year by the people of Medialab-Prado in Madrid.

The goal is writting a small sketch on processing.js language in order to be displayed in a huge LED screen that covers the whole front of Medialab's building.

I couldn't resist to see my own creation displayed in such an amazing screen so I took part and wrote a little program called "Night City Ride". It displays a short introduction and then starts generating scenes of a car going through the night while approaching a city, every scene takes some random values to generate different and unique scenes everytime.

Also, the interaction part comes as the application is connected to a NodeJS application running in a server, it asks Twitter for the last tweets containing the hashtag #nightcityride, then those tweets are displayed on the scene, flying from the city to the camera.

There is an application that simulates the screen behavior and where you can execute the code and watch the sketches the same way that appear on the screen, you can try my skech live following this link:

Night City ride by namelivia in #ProgramaLaPlaza2014

The NodeJS app code is hosted on Github, it also contains a landing page accesible in the left menu of this blog.

Night city ride server code on Github

And finally, here is a video were you can see some seconds of every sketched taking part in the event, some of these are amazing:

Programa la plaza project showcase

I had a great time and it was a wonderful experience, I always loved art almost as coding, and mixing those two loves and then displaying the result in such a huge screen was an unforgettable experience. Maybe I will repeat next year!

Yo can also check the videos in the project page