I like Processing, and enjoy my dabblings with it, but it’s much more interesting hearing how artists use it as a tool to achieve so much more. (See also the interviews with artists in ‘Processing’ by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.)

His latest post is about another of his rapid-prototyping projects, where he created a cup using Processing, based on meteorological data. It looks slipshod to say the least, but those variations are caused by climate change, and they reveal a trend. It’s a particularly interesting example of data visualisation, an area which will only grow in importance.

The Guardian newspaper has published many articles over recent years on opening up data e.g. on Ordnance Survey maps and crime, the London datastore is perhaps the first for many cities in this country (see also Transport for London), and the recent publication of the COINS database on government spending could lead to some interesting work.

At an apparently more prosaic, or at least human scale, Jeremy Wood is a GPS artist capturing activities like mowing the lawn, on display at Tenderpixel in London until 22 June.

There is so much potential for digital artists to use this data (though being confident in the use of APIs is a hefty requirement). But [the teeming void] doesn’t just capture data in interesting ways. He writes about it too. His post on the underlying messages about data in a series of IBM commericals is fascinating, and highly recommended reading on the slyly manipulative approach.

At the weekend, I went on an introductory course on the open source computer programming language Processing. Processing was developed specifically for artists and others who think visually rather than in code, so although it’s a powerful, low-level tool, you can achieve amazing things with it using only a few lines of code.

In fact, a competition called Tiny Sketch has just finished, where the main rule is that programmes (or sketches as they’re called in Processing) have a maximum of 200 characters. That’s not 200 lines of code but 200 characters – less than one and a half Twitter messages! Some of the entries are amazing.