Awesome! Check this video out…

Can’t wait until this show travels through Chicago! Via Phillip Kerman.

For those of my friends and colleagues who may not follow the Flash design/development topic area as much as I do, Flash on the Beach was last week. A well put together conference in Brighton, this one always seems to shine as a highlight in the conference schedule for a lot of designers. I have not made it to one yet. Alas. This year’s schedule had many of the very best and brightest designers on the speaker list, with a lot of them publishing their notes and slides on their respective sites. Some great content there for those of us who couldn’t make the trip.

Erik Natzke, Peter Elst, Aral Balkan, Keith Peters, Grant Skinner, the list goes on and on. Reading the recaps, including a statement by the conference’s organizer, John Davey, it seems as though one presentation stands out in it’s audacity, poignancy and message enough to really raise some hackles, eyebrows and maybe even a shaking fist or two. Jonathan Harris, designer of We Feel Fine as well as a few other online art pieces, had the last session of the show. Sounds like it was a doozy. Take a look at this shot:

In short, it seems as though Jonathan characterized the bulk of the work in digital art as being “tinkering” or “experiments”. It did not make many of the attendees happy, understandably so. Here is a bit of an outsider, crashing the party with some disheartening words to close a great conference attended by some of the most talented Flash using designers around. I would agree that many of the things I see out there are just that, too… however, the notion that something has to be heavy on message or ideology in order to be important or able to be fully enjoyed seems a bit pretentious to me. Much has been written on the topic, with an excellent post at Peter Elst’s blog featuring comments written by many of the aforementioned Flash talent as well as Jonathan himself. I’ll mention that you really should go check that out, as much of it is very thought provoking.

I have had conversations with a few people in the last several years that result in the same sort of conclusion for me when discussing heady topics like this. Why overanalyze what makes you happy with the work you produce? Sure, self progress and pushing a medium or message are certainly good things to aspire to, but they are not the only things that determine success in your work. We Feel Fine is cool, but is it any better than Joshua Davis’ fine compositions and now equally amazing textile work? How about Natzke’s brilliant stuff? Robert Hodgin’s amazing Processing sketches? A particularly well done Flash game or interactive museum installation? Will any of it have lasting appeal in 25 years+? Well, I think that if anyone asked that before they produced the work, would they even start it?

Probably not nearly as often, and that would be a shame. So with that, please continue your tinkering. I know I am.

After a long wait, I finally got my invite to a.viary. One word… WOW! This is RIA the way it was meant to be. Absolutely easy to use UI design, great user feedback, fast responsive interaction and tons of fun. These flex apps that I have tried out, Peacock and Phoenix are the tools I currently have access to. Phoenix is a Photoshop clone built in Flex and Peacock is a node based pattern generator built in Flex. Unbelievable! I have had a ton of fun with them already and can’t wait to see what comes out of this site. Great work by the Worth1000 team.

I have already given out my 5 invites, but hope to get some more soon. If you are interested in playing, direct message me on Twitter and send me your email… If I get more invites, you’ll be on my list. Until then, check out these images I created using Peacock… so fun!

A great song and a fabulous video. Check this out:

On top of the video being just really cool, the information on how it was made is also pretty engaging. It’s available at code.google.com, and you can actually get some of the source, too. Though it appears that the actual visualization used in the video was made using Processing, the point cloud data has also been used to make a 3D data visualization app built in Flash that allows you to rotate the nodes that comprise Thom Yorke’s visage around on the stage. Very cool stuff in general. Procedural animation FTW! Definitely worth reading up on.

A post on Josh Holmes‘ blog mentioned that he watches videos on the TED site regularly to gain insight into topics he may not have heard about before. This is a brilliant way to take advantage of some seriously good content at that site. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and is the world’s foremost conference for bringing together the world’s thought leaders. To attend this conference is cost prohibitive and also unattainable for many due to the fact that you must join the association ($6000!) and apply for attendance for the events. A pretty high bar of entry. However, over 200 of the conferences sessions are available on the site and able to be viewed by us mere mortals. There is some mind blowing content on that site, and I previously blogged about that Hans Rosling video on emerging nations stats on health and related topics. Great great stuff.

One such video that I would like to share with you is this presentation by the artist/statistician Chris Jordan. From the site:

Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics — like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day.

The mix of art and science here is pretty delicious for a geek like me. I saw an appearance by Chris Jordan on The Colbert Report some time ago and it was entertaining, that clip is available here. I recommend you take 10 minutes and watch this video.