just wondering , if people haven't come across the rhizome digest, every
week some interesting interviews and a few announcements...
here s lev manovitch on flash, there's also a long interview with the
Raqs media collective from Delhi in this weeks. Postings can be quite
long but are usually worth it.
go to
www.rhizome.org (RHIZOME)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
6.
Date: 4.17.02
From: Lev Manovich ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Subject: Generation Flash (2/3)
The Unbearable Lightness of FLASH [1]
F-Biology
Flash artists are big on biological references. Abstract plants,
minimalist creatures, or simply clouds of pixels dance in patterns which
to a human eye signal "life" (Geoff Stearns: deconcept.com, Vitaly
Leokumovich: unclickable.com, Danny Hobart: dannyhobart.com;
uncontrol.com) Often we see self-regenerating systems. But this is not
life as it naturally developed on Earth; rather, it looks like something
we are likely to witness in some biotech laboratory where biology is put
in the service of industrial production. We see hyper accelerated
regeneration and evolution. We see complex systems emerging before our
eyes: millions of years of evolution are compressed into a few seconds.
There is another feature that distinguishes life a la Flash from real
life: the non-existence of death. Biological organisms and systems are
born, they develop, and eventually they die. In short, they have
teleology. But in Flash projects life works differently: since these
projects are loops, there is no death. Life just keeps running forever -
more precisely, until your computer maintains Net connection.
Amplification: Flash aesthetics and Computer Games
Abstract ecosystems in Flash projects have another characteristic that
makes playing so pleasurable (Joel Fox). They brilliantly use the power
of the computer to amplify user's actions. This power puts a computer in
line with other magical devices; not accidentally, the most obvious
place to see it is in games, although it is also at work in all of our
interactions with a computer. For instance, when you tell Mario to step
to the left by moving a joystick, this initiates a small delightful
narrative: Mario comes across a hill; he starts climbing the hill; the
hill turns to be too steep; Mario slides back onto the ground; Mario
gets up, all shaking. None of these actions required anything from us;
all we had to do is just to move the joystick once. The computer program
amplifies our single action, expanding it into a narrative sequence.
Historically, computer games were always a step ahead from the general
human computer interface. In the 1960s and 1970s users communicated with
a computer using non-graphical interfaces: entering the program onto a
stack of punch cards, typing on a command line, and so on. In contrast
since their beginnings in the late 1950s, computer games adopted
interactive graphical interface - something that only came to personal
computers in the 1980s.
Similarly, today's games already use what many computer scientists think
will be the next paradigm in HCI: active amplification of user's
actions. In the future, we are told, agent programs would watch our
interactions with a computer, notice the patterns, and then automate
many tasks we do regularly, from backing up the data at regular
intervals to filtering and answering our email. The computer would also
monitor our behavior and attention level, adjusting its behavior
accordingly: speeding up, slowing down, and so on. In some ways this new
paradigm is already at work in some applications: for instance, a
Internet browser offers us the list of sites relevant to the topic we
are searching on; Microsoft Office Assistant trying to guess when we
need help. However, there is a crucial problem with moving to such
active amplification across the whole of HCI. The more power we delegate
to a computer, the more we lose control over what it is doing. How do we
know that the agent program identified a correct pattern in our daily
use of email? How do we know that a commerce agent we send on the Web to
negotiate with other agents the lowest price for a product was not
corrupted by them? In short, how do we know that a computer amplified
our actions correctly?
Computer games are games, and the worst that may happen is that we lose.
Therefore active amplification is present in practically every game:
Mario embarking on mini-narratives of its own with a single move of a
joystick; troops conducting complex military maneuvers while you
directly control only their leader in Rainbow Six; Lora Craft executing
whole acrobatic sequences with a press of a keyboard key. (Note that in
"normal" games this amplification does not exist: when you move a single
figure on a chessboard, this is all that happens; your move does not
initiate a sequence of steps.)
Flash projects heavily use active amplification. It gives many projects
the magical feeling. Often we are confronted with an empty screen, but a
single click brings to life a whole universe: abstract particle systems,
plant-like outlines, or a population of minimalist creatures. The user
as a God controlling the universe is something we also often encounter
in computer games; but Flash projects also give us the pleasure of
creating the universe from scratch.
The active amplification is not the only feature Flash projects share
with games. More generally, computer games are for Flash generation what
movies were for Wharhol. Cinema and TV colonized the unconscious of the
previous generations of media artists who continue to use the gallery as
their therapy coach, spilling bits and pieces of their childhood media
archives in public - for instance, Douglas Gordon. Flash artists are
less obsessed with commercial time-based media. Instead, their
iconography, temporal rhythms, and interaction aesthetics come from
games (Mike Clavert: mikeclavert.com). Sometimes the user participation
is needed for the Flash game to work; sometimes the game just plays
itself (UTOPIA by futurefarmers.com; dextro.org).
Flash versus Net Art
Tirana Biennale 01 Internet exhibition: this title is deeply ironic. The
exhibition did not include any projects from Albany, or any other post-
communist East European country for that matter. This was quite
different from many early net art exhibitions of the middle of the 1990s
whose stars came from the East: Vuc Cosic, Alexei Shulgin, Olga Lialina.
1990s net art was the first international art movement since the 1960s
that included east Europe in a big way. Prague, Ljubljana, Riga, and
Moscow counted as much as Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York. Equally
including artists from the West and the East, net art perfectly
corresponded to the economic and social utopia of a new post Cold War
world of the 1990s.
Now this utopia is over. The power structure of the global Empire has
become clear, and the demographics of Tirana Biennale 01 Internet
section reflected this perfectly. Many artists included in Tirana
Biennale 01 Internet exhibition work in key IT regions of the world: San
Francisco (Silicon Valley), New York (Silicon Alley) and Northern
Europe.
What happened? In the mid 1990s, net art relied on simple HTML that run
well on both fast and slow connections - and this is enabled active
participation of the artists from the East. But the subsequent
colonization of the Web by multimedia formats - Flash, Shockwave,
QuickTime, and so on - restored the traditional West/East power
structure. Now Web art requires fast Internet connections for both the
artist and the audiences. With its slow connections, East is out of the
game. The Utopia is over; welcome to the Empire.
(Tirana Biennale 01 did include one artist from China who contributed a
beatiful animation of martial arts fighters. But we never found who he
was. All we knew about him was his email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Maybe he did not even live in China.)
Lightness
When I first visited the most famous Flash site - praystation.net - I
was struck by the lightness of its graphics. More quite when whisper,
more elegant than Dior or Channel, more minimal than 1960s minimalist
sculptures of Judd, more subdued than the winter landscape in heavy fog,
the site pushed the contrast scale to the limits of legibility. The
similar lightness and restrain can be found in many projects included in
Biennale 01 show. Again, the contrast with screaming graphics of
commercial media and the media art of the previous generations is
obvious.
The lightness of Flash can be thought of as a visual equivalent of
electronic ambient music. Every line and every pixel counts. Flash
appeals to our visual intelligence - and cognitive intelligence. After
the century of RGB color which begun with Matisse and ended with
aggressive spreads of Wired, we are asked to start over, to begin from
scratch. Flash generation invites us to undergo a visual cleansing -
this is why we see a monochrome palette, white and light gray. It uses
neo-minimalism as a pill to cure us from post-modernism. In Flash, the
rationality of modernism is combined with the rationality of programming
and the affect of computer games to create the new aesthetics of
lightness, curiosity and intelligence. Make sure your browser have the
right plug-in: welcome to generation Flash.
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NOTES
[1] Tirana Biennale 01 Internet section
(www.electronicorphanage.com/biennale) was organized by Miltos Manetas /
Electronic Orphanage. The exhibition consisted from a few dozen projects
by Web designers and artists, many of whom work in Flash or Schockwave.
Manetas comissioned me, Peter Lunenfeld, and Norman Klein to write the
analysis of the show. This text is my contribution; many ideas in it
developed out of the conversations the three of us had about the works
in the show. The joint text entitled "KLM Theory" will be released soon.
The names in brackets below refer to the artists in the show; go to the
show site to see their projects.
I should also make it clear that many of the sites which inspired me to
think of "Flash aesthetics" are not necessaraly made with Flash; they
use Shockwave, Javascript, Java, and other Web multimedia formats and
scripting languages. Thus the qualities I describe below as specefic to
"Flash aesthetics" are not unique to projects made in Flash.
http://deconcept.com
http://unclickable.com
http://dannyhobart.com
http://uncontrol.com
http://mikeclavert.com
http://futurefarmers.com
http://dextro.org
http://praystation.net
http://www.electronicorphanage.com/biennale
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