I just arrived back from Brighton after almost a week of volunteering at Flash on the Beach 2007.
I have to say that volunteering there was one of the most rewarding non-paid experiences I have ever had. With other 14 fellow companions coming mostly from the surroundings of Brighton, we got along quite well with the organizers of the event. I was quite surprised to see that this whole massive meeting was organized by just one man (John), and maintained by his family and a couple of friends including the little Amy (John and Joe’s daughter) who was building her little house out of the boxes we were sorting and contributed to make the whole thing more of a game than a job.
The whole experience was worth the 8 hour round trip travel, and sleeping on the floor for 6 nights.
In this post I give ‘marks’, not to people’s work obviously (that’d be quite pretentious) but to their speeches and to what I got out of them.
OK so here’s just some of the events I took part of and my feedback for them:
Sunday
Dominic Minns and Seb Lee-Delisle - ‘Game Development workshop
Unluckily I didn’t get to take part to the whole event as there were still some help to give in the morning. But for what I’ve seen Seb and Dominic from the twisted Plug in media company, kept their game developing process accessible and easy to understand by guiding us in a step-by-step problem solving game building. I came up with a bunch of ideas after seeing their Vector class used in that particular case to orient an object to its velocity direction.
Double plus for Dominic being so funny.
Final vote: n.a.
related links: www.pluginmedia.net
Monday
Grant Skinner - ‘50 reasons why AS3 kicks ass’
Or ‘50 reasons why Grant Skinner kicks ass’, (and anyway why America is so obsessed about kicking butts I still don’t understand). When I saw Grant the first time I didn’t recognize him (despite I have been constantly lurking on his Incomplet gallery webcam experiment in the past), I even thought for a second he was the son of one of the speakers (sorry Grant, but I’m slightly short sighted and you look definitely too young). Grant gave a vary, but really specific session based on some new advantages AS3. He definitely confirmed to be the ‘guru’ he claims to be. I briefly talked with him at the end: he seems not only to be a good developer and lecturer but a very humble, funny person as well. He gave me quite a good inspiration about perlin noise and I will probably post soon an experiment about it. Worth checking out his new works and Buzzword : a flash based text editor he contributed to that is getting more popular every day.
Final vote: 8/10
related links: www.gskinner.com/blog , incomplet.gskinner.com
Joshua Davis - ‘Dynamic Abstraction’
Joshua Davis doesn’t need any introduction. During the last 5 years he was defined by IDonline as a ‘rockstar of web designers’. This speech, in fact, stays at a flash conference as a smashed electric guitar feedback stays at a humming of a computer fan. Joshua gave a restless fuck*-raining talk about his work process and some fundamentals of computational art. He spoke about layout which he confines in Grid and Canvas system and the arrangement of objects in terms of chaos, quiet and texture. He also spoke about his main inspirations: from Pollock (even though he’s not his favourite) to japanese artists to textile designers (I’m seriously waiting for www.ilovemycarpet.com now). Thus he pointed out the importance of finding your inspiration outside your work environment. As with many other speakers Joshua reaffirmed the concept of playing, experimenting and allowing randomness into your work that can lead to surprising results. In the end it was a very inspiring speech which turned out to be one of the most popular as well.
Final vote: 8/10
related links: www.joshuadavis.com , www.once-upon-a-forest.com
Brendan Dawes - ‘If it ain’t broken, break it’ (inspirational talk)
Our first inspirational talk was with Brendan Dawes. Brendan’s speech wasn’t based mainly on Flash or Actionscript, or on any other programming language. He talked about feeling and emotion: it is not hard to see from his works that Brandan is fond of movies, and what he wanted to denote and share with us (I think) is how methods and techniques from other media can be used in our everyday work. Hillman Curtis supported this concept in his talk later and told us how similar approaches could be taken in film making and design. Brandan gave us examples on the use of surprise and suspence factors inherited by movies in a web interface. To prove this concept he showed us a website where the mouse cursor was hidden/altered in response to user interaction and how the ’shock’ made the page memorable for the visitor. Even if some of the experiments weren’t working due to technical issues I can say that the speech was absolutely enjoyable and funny (Brendan from the tales of his close friend John seems quite a comedy character). Absolutely loved his final video turntable session.
Final vote: 8/10
related links:www.madebymn.co.uk , www.brendandawes.com
Tuesday
Craig Swann - ‘perceptive interactions +alternative interfaces’
Craig Swann from crash!media.com has given the best speech on interaction design and flash I’ve heard so far. To be honest I knew very little about him before FOTB but his works are really jaw-dropping. Craig is mainly an interface/interactive designer and he examined interaction under 3 different sensory fields: sight, touch and sound. His many experiments (and we have seen a small part of them) are conceptually stunning and beautifully realised. Craig has one of the rare genius qualities that makes something look really simple but beautiful. My favourite experiments were the webcam ones on the perception of time but only because I haven’t seen the physical ones. My craving for physical computing was partly satisfied in the end when Craig embraced a MIDI guitar connected to his computer and modulated the video signal of the webcam attached to it with flash.
final vote: 9/10
related links: www.crashmedia.com
Mario Klingemann - ‘2d or not 2d that is the question’
From what I saw, Mario is a super coder. Some of the things he’s working on are mind blowing. For the little I’ve played with bitmaps in Flash it’s incredible to see how far Mario pushed the boundaries in this field. He presented a prototype of magic wand for flash to be included in a photoshop-like flash based application (!), and some bitmap collision detection experiments. After the impressive showcase of his trick bag, Mario went on a final demonstration of his custom cam color detection where he exhibited a final finger dance to the notes of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll meet again”. Seeing a ultra-geek like Mario setting up a show like that after a good hour of code talk was absolutely unexpected.
final vote: 8.5/10
related links: www.quasimondo.com
Erik Natzke - ‘Beyond the knowledge - the art of play’ (inspirational talk)Obsessively pre-announced and suggested by Jon, Erik had the second (and last) ‘inspirational talk’ of the conference. I first met the impressive figure of Erik while we were preparing the goodies bags the first day. In this regard I have to say that Internet makes people smaller as seeing Erik walking around using his little new MacBook was quite impressive. Imagine a bear playing with a cat and you’ll have the picture. Anyway, he is probably one of the ‘hybrids’ that his friend Joshua Davis talked about: altering his algorithm outputs with image editing programs. Erik produces breathtaking abstract pictures using Flash, and tiles the outputs on a large image using Air and then edits the whole result in Photoshop. Erik’s work like Robert’s and Joshua’s is deliberately much closer to fine art than graphic design (if the boundaries of the two disciplines with the advent of computational processes are still defined). Erik talked about how a commercial work could make the basis for a personal artwork. Therefore to not discard the code we produced for a commercial work as it could be useful for a personal project and vice versa. In the end the prank he played on exporting flash by dragging swfs on Photoshop windows got many people from the audience excited. A big plus for personality.
final vote: 9/10
related links: jot.eriknatzke.com
Wednesday
Markos Weskamp - ‘Visualizing time’
Markos’speech was a great surprise. To be honest I didn’t remember his name or his works at first, but I attended his lecture because I was quite intrigued by the title. He started unrolling a big roll of paper in front of the stage in order to show us how to portray time on a big scale: from the big bang to human life. The stripe of paper was long enough to fill three times the theater width, and at its beginning there was the Big Bang and at its end the present age. It turned out that mans life on Earth is just 3 millimeters of the whole thing. With these observations Markos went on explaining the difficulties that can occur when visualizing big amounts of data. He showed us many examples of his work including a visualization of the Tree of life (the list of all species from bacteria to mammals that have lived on Earth) and algorithm for visualizing informations such as trimap filters and so on. Then he continued with a little showcase of his past works and it was here that I realized that I’ve seen his works already a few years ago and they were brilliant. I think I’ve seen a cloud tag for the first time in one of his websites. Great stuff!
Final vote: 9/10
related links: www.marumushi.com
Dr Woohoo - ‘Dr Woohoo reveals the secret techniques behind his artwork and In The Mod‘
I met Dr. Wahoo the first day of Flash in the Beach. He and his wonderful haircut were going around with his friend and co-citizen Jared the first day we arrived. Dr Woohoo showed great interest in the speakers at FOTB and in fact he was present at almost every speech I went to. His speech was introduced by a video on his latest colour experiments based on famous paintings. The work of Dr. Woohoo is in fact mainly centered on color study and color analogies amongst different visual artworks. What really strikes me about his works is the intricate spaghetti-like process in producing images and the multiple applications that he uses for a single piece. The other big chunk of his speech was dedicated to In the Mod which reassemble all his color experiments and also shows an interesting history of the use of colors by a single artist. The top feature of his speech was the fact that he managed to connect everything together by creating palettes for Adobe applications (Photoshop, Illustrator and After effects) and Processing that dynamically downloaded color swatches from In The Mod.
Final vote: 7.5/10
related links: www.drwoohoo.com
Jared Tarbell - ‘Algorithms to fill space‘
The last speech was from Jared Tarbell, and it would probably deserve a post of his own. Most of the people that I know that were fascinated by designing with code started wrapping their head around (i.e. copying) the experiments from levitated.net. I think there’s a main cause behind this big interest around his work. The programming approach that Jared has goes beyond simple aesthetics and eye candy and delves deeper into the ground of examining nature and behaviour by the use of maths and computing.
During his speech Jared was showing us the computations of his experiments alongside carefully selected music. This way of showing his experiments alongside an entertaining factor, amplifies a feeling that I usually have after coding and seeing the results of my work. The music sustains the feeling of having generated something with its own rules, a little world apart. The more appropriate the music the more narrative power the world will have. The lesson that I got from this speech was above all to keep care of the world you create, keeping special attention to its core reactions; being it a game, a still image, a creature simulation or an interface. Jared Tarbell had a standing ovation from my neurons.
final vote: 10/10
related links: www.etsy.com , www.levitated.net , www.complexification.net
Conclusions
Being my very first webdesign related conference I’ve attended, it was greatly rewarding. I don’t know if it was Brighton, the family ambiance that welcomed us there, everyone playing with the Wii at the Adobe stands, or something else but I can say that the atmosphere at FOTB was incredible: instead of finding serious professional speakers in suits I was surrounded by guys that could have been hanging out with me at school. You could see uber geeks turning into party animals in the span of a few hours. I have to also say that every single speaker I talked to was amazingly open minded and ready to help. This may show something about the community spirit this job creates.
thanks to John Davey again to let me take part in this.
See you next year in Brighton!
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