Flash on the Beach 08
I've just come back from the excellent three day Flash on the Beach conference. Here are a few highlights:
Jeremy Thorp did a great session on 'emergence', discussing how complex systems arise where relatively simple interactions take place between lots of individual things.
A beautiful example of this is flocking:
Flocking can be simulated by giving each agent (bird) a set of simple rules to follow:
- move towards the general direction of all agents
- move away from your immediate neighbours
- move towards general direction of neighbours
This was first modeled by a clever man called Craig Reynold in 1986 and most recently used by Cogapp in Processing to model swarming fish for an interactive installation...
Jeremy Thorp then showed some beautiful work based on giving colours weightings and allowing them to trade as if in a visual stock market:
The Colour Economy: Test Pattern from blprnt on Vimeo
Mario Klingemann stepped through the process of reading a QR code in Flash.
Once read the coordinate mapping system developed during this project can be used to create augmented reality tests. This is similar to the work being done by Active Vision Group at Oxford University though it's Flash rather than C++.
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Jonathon Harris lived up to my (high) expectations with the final talk of the conference.
I love the fact that the large data sets collected from some of his interactive pieces are still kept and in use:
- in 10x10 you can now go back to anywhere in the last 4 years and view the top 100 news stories/images collected from Reuters and the BBC.
- there are something like 11 million imprints in the We Feel Fine database which have been analysed by some American universities to reach some odd (and not so odd) conclusions such as:
- in general people are getting happier
- there is a dip in happiness in the summer (I expect this is just because all the happy people have stopped blogging and gone outside...)
He ended by showing some affecting work from his next piece and encouraging the general internet / interactive communities to create work based on strong ideas and not to get too hung up on technologies (which he espoused in a much broader and more interesting way than I've summed up here).
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A few other technical sessions I liked:
Koen de Weggheleire gave a fun educational talk on a complex topic - matrix maths to create visual effects (blur, emboss, find edges, and OSX Photobooth style effects).
Richard Lord gave a really clear talk about his open-source particle engine - Flint.
Particles seem to be the route of a lot of Flash / Processing creative work - a lot of Eric Nazke's is based on lines being drawn between particles (massive over-simplification - great work, great speaker):
Chris Allen gave a speedy run-through setting up Red5 (open-source flash server, i.e. a Flash Media Server replacement) - great to see this technology really maturing.
Joa Ebert has too many brain cells and uses them to create a Flash based audio tool (Hobnox) along with Andre Michelle - really impressive problem solving within the Flash Player.
Looking forward to the next one already......
Comments
Tristan - you just beat me too his response...
I think what surprises me most is that I felt his talk was very carefully thought through and well constructed - it would have been easy to pick out specific examples for criticism or to have deliberately belittled areas of the flash community.
For me it was great to hear someone talk about the potential of the online creative/programmer (not really just flash) community - I left excited about all the possibilities ahead of me, the technologies and the 'community'.
I'm really surprised at how offended some people have been - here's the response from Jonathon Harris himself.
Hi Tim.
Jonathon Harris, whose talk was my highlight of the week, was not without controversy. Rich discusses it here: http://richtextformat.net/blog/?p=211
Thanks for the link Matt (zenbullets) - interesting stuff.
Now, I didn't see this talk (although I'm a huge fan of wefeelfine), but reading through Rich's 'defense' of Jonathon's talk, as well as Jonathon's own response, I am definitely inclined to side with his criticisms of the Flash community specifically, and of rich online media in general.
In any gathering by any clique (and affiliation with certain technology seems to create them like mushrooms), there is always a tendency to end up creating a self-referential, congratulatory festival of backslapping. As Jonathon himself says "in the prevailing climate of blind positivity and technological exuberance, it seemed that a dissenting voice was missing and needed.".
And it is these dissenting, challenging voices that are often the most useful. I am reminded of a fantastic presentation by the talented Zope developer Chris Withers at the Plone Conference in 2005. His talk, entitled 'Plone Rocks My World' (PDF, 115k), proceeded to systematically criticise almost everything about the Plone framework, its development community and its marketing efforts. It rubbed a huge number of people up the wrong way, but it provided a greatly welcome note of criticism amongst the standard fare of straight-up tutorials and plugs for specific modules or techniques.
Long live the dissenters.
More on this here:
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/jonathan-harris-only-connect/
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