Flash on the Beach 2008 Round-up (Part one)

For the uninitiated, Flash on the Beach is an annual three-day conference held in Brighton every year. It now has a sister conference in the warmer and sunnier Miami. The content is mostly, as the name suggests, Flash-based, but there’s a lot of stuff that can happily be applied to many other mediums. Here’s my round-up of the bits that stood out for me over the three days.

Chris Orwig:
The Art and Craft of Photographic Impact

Douglas Kirkland by Chris Orwig

Bearing in mind that I’m an avid camera-weilder, let’s kick it off with my first stand-out session… and not just because it’s a talk on photography at a Flash conference!

One point that stood out for me was Chris’ notion of photography being very much like poetry, “what the novelist says in 10,000 words the poet says in 10.” That a photographer takes an idea then reduces and simplifies it. A process that easily translates to many creative endeavours, including design and development. We can use always less to communicate an idea. Less is very often more, reminding me of this very famous quote by writer Antoine de Saint Exupery:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

He ended his session with a series of projects (they’re online so you can play along at home) as well as some book and lens recommendations.

Talking of lenses, he also touched on the perceived need to get more kit to make you a better photographer which is, of course, not true. Get out there and take photos, carry your camera around and shoot.

Erik Natzke:
Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play

Erik Natzke

Erik took us through his creative process of sketching out his ideas through to the finished product. His latest work involves using particles to create a brush which then draws colours from an underlying photograph to generate “paint”. Incredibly difficult to explain (Erik did it so much better!) but the results speak for themselves.

Aral Balkan:
Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit (or 5 Rules for Hedonistic Creatives)

Create. Share. Profit. Play.

Is that five? Er, anyway…

Create. Make something that works and worry about evolving it later. Don’t be scared about bashing something out and architecture… crappy code is better than no code and you can always change things later. Get it working, out there, and go from there.

Share. If you share your idea before you’ve started to create anything you create a responsibility to move on get it done.

Profit. Earn money doing what you love. If you aren’t doing what you love in your day job, make a little money on side-projects.

Most importantly… Play. There are no mistakes. Make and use happy tools… simple things that are practical, hackable and delightful.

There was one little app that Aral demonstrated that I thought was rather cool. Scratch is a MIT-developed drag and drop programming language. Basically a really intuitive way to help “young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.”

Jeremy Thorp:
Emergence

Jeremy demonstrated a couple of his recent personal projects he’d developed in Processing. Firstly, The Colour Economy:

“What if pixels were free? What if they could trade their computer-given red, green, and blue values in pursuit of a profit?

Here, we see a clear example of what I call ‘bridging behaviour’. Though individual traders are limited as to how far they can ’see’, colour groups often form ‘trade routes’ allowing them to trade over much longer distances. This is not specifically programmed behaviour, and indeed was somewhat surprising to see.”

Secondly, Plumage grabs photos from Flickr based on a keyword search and creates feathers with the colours within that photo.

Carla Diana:
Robots! The Interface Designer’s Holy Grail

I’ve always been fascinated by robots and other miscellany automata so was naturally curious about this session. Carla was the lead industrial designer on S.A.M., an emotionally expressive robot. S.A.M. is the product of Andrea Thomaz and the Georgia Institute of Technology and, sadly, I don’t seem to find anything further on it online.

What was fascinating were the ways she tried to redesign it so it no longer scared children(!), how they overcame it not having any legs and so on.

James Paterson:
Modulating a lot

Now, I’m going to have to be perfectly honest here; I didn’t actually attend James’ talk! While his name seemed incredibly familiar at the time it wasn’t until I checked out his stuff online that I realised he was the co-founder of the online (and later offline) magazine Half Empty with age-old online friend Marty Spellerberg.

Anyway, before I start to ramble on about my Internet adventures circa 1996, I’m really disappointed I missed it. He’s doing some really fun stuff nowadays! Including this (not quite as disgusting as it sounds) blackhead squeezing simulator.

And this, the Sonic Wire Sculpture, an illustrative sound engine developed by Amit Pitaru: