Field, core early access

Field is an experimental development environment for digital artists who write code. It has been developed by OpenEnded Group is and now released under GPL v3. The current alpha version is targeted towards developers who have pre-exiting java code-bases into which they can integrate Field; however, over time we expect this audience to broaden. Already there is a bridge to the Processing libraries as well as 2d-vector and image based drawing packages. While Field as a generally available tool is rather immature, it has a long heritage inside OpenEnded, where it has been developed continuously since 2002 and has served as our primary art development platform for almost all of our work since then. A tour of our main website is a good place to gather some idea of the breadth of work that it might be used to help develop.

To get us off to a start, the current code-base contains a cleaned up "core", to which we are adding elements from OpenEnded's large codebase over time.

This slow release of Field and its associated libraries (non-photorealistic rendering, AI, motion-capture, computer vision and computer music), is a process of transitioning from a personal tool — with a meandering, organic feature set, over-fitted to OpenEnded's goals in any given year — to a widely used, stable platform.

This might not work at all — personal tools quite often should just be kept that way. But we think we have something interesting here, something that might genuinely change the community of digital artists for the better, and we're willing to release as much of our code as we can get clean enough to be useful to sweeten the deal. In exchange we need your ideas and your work to take this environment beyond the limits of our own hands and imaginations.

Getting Started

First you'll need a Mac, running Leopard, with as much RAM as you can afford, and as good a graphics card as you can find. (Desperate for a PC port? Contact us, but be prepared to be the driving force for it.)

Some points of departure as they currently stand.

• InstallingField has information about how to get, build and test Field.
• The Documentation is the page where you'll find the most important documentation.

Other places to start:

• SimpleProcessingTutorial is a tutorial for artists who have used the popular programming environment Processing, it's also a good place to start for people completely new to Field.
• RunningField talks about the various ways that Field can be run, and indicates some of the ways that you might integrate Field into your own code-base. Don't worry, you can always just double-click on the application icon!

Finally, two more sustained sources of information: a recent paper on Field, written for ACM Computers in Entertainment FieldForACMCIE.pdf and the Field page of our main website: http://www.openendedgroup.com/index.php/software/

OpenEnded is already 6 years into the development of this software, which is part of our workflow every day. We're in this for the long haul. Join Us.