Mobile Art && Code

Directed by David S. Evans

3 hours, $75. Workshop location TBA.
Friday 6-Nov, 9am-12 OR Sunday 8-Nov, 2pm-5pm.
It will help if you’ve done a little programming before.

Make an outdoor projection system that displays the text messages sent to it by passersby! Make an interactive artwork that alerts you with a text message when something goes horribly wrong! Make a system that replies with anagrams to your own texts! Make a fun daily service that generates random haikus and sends them as texts to your subscribers!

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how the Short Message Service (SMS) works — and you’ll get experience using Processing (Java) and PHP code to automatically generate and receive text messages in the SMS format. You’ll be provided with handy code templates for handling SMS with Processing, PHP, and possibly ActionScript.

Your skill level:
This hands-on workshop is ideal for people with a little bit of programming experience (in PHP, Processing, ActionScript, or Java). We recommend you have a semester’s experience of programming in one of these languages, or a similar one. You’re all set if you’ve had an introductory (100-level) programming course.

What you should bring:
Feel free to bring your laptop (any operating system) and your cell phone.

More information:
This workshop will introduce you to DeepLocal’s Gumband API, which is an easy way for developers to send and receive SMS text messages from their own applications. It’s simple to set up: we give you sample code, let you sign up for a few keywords, and allow you 100 free monthly outgoing messages to start. These aren’t email to SMS gateway accounts — this is real shortcode texting just like big companies use. For more information, including example apps, see http://www.gumband.com/.