September 24th, 2009
By way of documentary proof that I went through with it, here are a few photos of me speaking at the Flash On The Beach conference on Tuesday (with thanks to Avangelist and Leerraum Imaginationen).
It was quite a big deal for me. Public speaking is a long way from my natural habitat, and the prospect of speaking to 1000+ at what is easily the most impressive hall in Brighton, was, I’ll be frank, utterly terrifying. But I got through it, and actually enjoyed it once I was on stage.
For the benefit of those who saw it, the Generative Art blog I was talking about was not this one, but 100 Abandoned Artworks, which is where you can find the source code for all I showed (anything that isn’t there at the mo will be in the coming months).
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Posted in flash, fotb, generative art, tech |
October 10th, 2008
The Digital Arts are in their awkward adolescence, a period defined, mainly, by groping:
Businesses grope with how to use the new medium to make money. Hobbyists grope with how to use the new medium to have fun. Artists grope with how to use the new medium to say something about the world.
….
We speak a new and powerful language, capable of saying things no other language can say, but few have realized this, and even fewer have found what to say.
This was part of Jonathan Harris’s closing words to Flash On The Beach 2008, a conference I attended last week. His message caused a bit of a stir, with a lot of people offended by either the words, his tone in delivering them, the shoes he wore while delivering them, the hair nature had blessed him with … to be honest I’ve no idea why they were so offended, but they were. It has been much discussed on other blogs, so I won’t go into it here. Except to say – Harris was right.
Everyone I know who is involved in the Digital medium are very focused upon their tools. When a new tool is released, or an old one gets an upgrade, there is much excitement, and a rush of experimentation to see what can be done with the new toy. This is what the conference was about – what’s new in the world of Flash. But, despite how cool it is to be able to do new things with pixels, if you step back from it a little you can see how primitive this current set of tools are, how difficult they are to use, and how much they impede our creativity.
Just as a culture is defined by its language (a concept for which we don’t have words simply cannot survive in a culture, but one that has many words thrives), an artform is defined by its tools. Our tools are PhotoShop, Flash, Java, After Effects, Illustrator, C++, HTML, CSS, Processing, etc, which all do incredibly cool things. But when we compare them to the tools of other media – paintbrushes, pencils, pens, chisels, scalpels – we see how far removed they are from natural and instinctual ways of expressing ourselves.
Getting a Hold of One’s Tool
The purpose of tools is not only to extend our capabilities; they are also to enhance the flow of our creativity. The digital tools, like the ones I listed above, fail to do this. All of them have a steep learning curve, and require dedication and constant use to master. A child cannot quickly pick up Illustrator. Even an adult with a certain degree of techno-savvy cannot come fresh to a program like PhotoShop and find a way to express themselves within a few minutes. Whereas with a pencil, or a paintbrush, they could.
These tools are also, with the exception of the Open Source tools, expensive – which adds another barrier to their use. And they all seem to come with ways of using them which have already become rather tired and over-familiar. They are hindering our creativity at the same time as they are extending it.
This is not to say that our digital tools are bad, they are just the best we have got to date. But, as Harris was correct in pointing out, because the medium is only in its infancy there is still a long way to go before we have the tools to make Digital Masterpieces. The tools will evolve, and through their evolution they will become simpler. Programming languages and design packages are today the preserve of the geeks, but this will not always be the case. 10 years ago, if you wanted to build a website you needed a web designer. This was the cause of the first dot.com bubble. These days you have WordPress and you can do it yourself. The same will happen to everything else in the Digital world.
Already great strides are being made in visual programming languages, where logic can be defined by shapes rather than syntax. And the web buzzword of the last few years has been usability – not worrying about making things pretty or powerful anymore, but making them easy to use. These are our steps towards adulthood.
To quote Harris once more:
Tools exist to serve you. Not the other way around. There is a long-standing unspoken pact between tools and their owners, which says that tools should disappear the moment you stop needing them. This is the way that pencils, hammers, and leaf-blowers behave. But many of our technological devices – iPods, cellphones, laptops, Blackberries – have violated this pact and overstepped their boundary, asserting themselves onto the lives of their owners, becoming constant distractions. Don’t let your tools trap you. Tools are not the idea. Tools are tools.
Posted in art, culture, flash, fotb, open source, tech, web |
January 2nd, 2008
Is there such a thing?
Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Walsall, Coventry and the rest of the West Midlands conurbation have always had a healthy Arts scene, which I have continued to follow remotely via Created In Birmingham, Creative Wolverhampton, et al. But for some time I have been trying to uncover a comparable Midlands New Media scene, and drawn a blank. Either the Midland New Media scene is too small to be seen, or is very well hidden.
Xmas always drags me back to the heartland for a tour of duty (never a chore as I love Wolverhampton and miss it dearly), and whenever I’m back I nose around looking for some signs of New Media activity. Last week I went to Wolverhampton Art Gallery and saw their Pop Art exhibition. Wolves Art Gallery is usually good at promoting local talent, and when I saw they had a touch-screen interactive for the exhibition, I had to seek out the local talent employed to build it. But, after a bit of research, I was VERY disappointed to discover they had employed a London agency for the job.
It’s a great little interactive, but really nothing that complicated. It takes a snapshot using the iMac built in camera, gives you some drawing tools to pop-tart it up a bit, and then uploads it to Flickr. The kids love it, clearly, and it kept me and my little one entertained. But technology-wise, it was the kind of stuff I was doing five years ago, so I couldn’t understand why this had needed to be farmed out of the county. Unless of course that there simply isn’t even the most basic of New Media skills in the Midlands area. Please say this isn’t true.
The UK clearly has it’s New Media hubs – London, Brighton and Bristol – all of which we know about because their activity is very visible. I am several miles from Bristol but I can keep up with what’s going on there via the underscore mailing list. In Brighton we have the BNM list, the Flash Brighton Group, Brighton Bloggers, the Digital Festival, the Flash On The Beach conference and many more. When I look for similar evidence of life in the Midlands area – it just isn’t there.
I’d love to be able to return to the heartland one day soon. I spent most of the nineties farting around on the Birmingham Arts scene (working for the mighty VIVID), and I have always thought of my sojourn in Brighton as a temporary placement (eight years and counting). But I make my living in New Media now, so it looks like I would be unemployed if I was to return home.
So this is my question for the day – why is there no Midlands New Media scene? Please don’t say I’m going to have to come up there to try and start one.
Posted in art, culture, flash, tech, web |
October 6th, 2007
I love 70’s childhood pictures. It’s as if everyone’s childhood had the same washed out colour palette.
This was a little AS3 experiment I did earlier in the year, back when I used to have time for coding. It draws in random photos from flickr and applies a few filters to try and recreate that 70’s childhood pics vibe.
There’s not much to it but I was rather pleased with it. If you like it too, you might also like some of the other stuff on my generative flash page.
Posted in art, culture, flash, generative art, retro, tech |
May 10th, 2007
Experimenting with ActionScript 3. Useless but pretty. Less than 4k! You can expand it to browser sized by clicking here.
I have written a tutorial on creating this effect.
tags: flash, fractals, as3, actionscript 3
Posted in flash, generative art, tech |
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