on the 17th of november, I had a chance to give my very first session about Flash at the AUGXL, in Amsterdam.
epic.

first it was the occasion to meet the people I appreciate very much and to meet some inspiring people. this alone would be enough to get me there :)

second, it would be the first time I’d talk about the basics of generative art in front of a (compact) crowd and, as it happened 2 weeks before my workshop, I knew it would be an excellent rehearsal + as I prepared quite some material for the students, I decided to use it instead of creating new content from scratch.

so the first thing I’ve shown was something I intended to do for a while ; a comparative timeline of the main artistic currents of the last century VS the generative art pieces ( mostly in Flash but not only ) from the last decade.

my point was not to say ” look at those art-impedimented brainless self-proclaimed generative-artist” but rather to make everyone feel comfortable with the idea that we all belong to art history.

before I forget and I know it’s not a nice thing to do. I didn’t ask permission to use the pictures. for each item of the “generative” part, I’ve put a link beneath that leads to the author of the content. consider it a “student’s study”, I’m not making money with this, if you feel offended, I’ll remove the incriminaed pictures.

this is an overview of the thing, maybe you’ll recognize some art pieces.
the art side ranging from Étienne-Jules Marey chronophotographies ( 1870 ! ) to kinetic art ( roughly 1960-1970 )

click to enlarge a bit

the generative side, I’m sure you’ll recognize some pieces :)

click to enlarge a bit

the most interesting part is to switch from one to the other.

this gives us a FAT ( 17Mo ) flash diaporama that you can download here: DIAAAPO’RAMAA ( right click save as )
then you can use left-right / up-down arrows to navigate the art pieces and use the mighty spacebar to view what it made me think of. the relationship between ancient / recent artworks is not always obvious, I tried to link them either by formal or conceptual relationship.
also there are very many generative artists out there and I could surely find better examples, my point was to talk about Flash in general. each of the generative people I quoted usually have a broad range of activities & research fields. don’t be scared to dive into their work.

I told you I met some good people there, I just wanted to add a couple of links to their sites, in case you don’t know them. rob bateman, barcinski (intense discussions!) from barcinski & jeanjean, Marc Thiele, even John Davey, swingpants, Roland *Kitty* Zwaga, Peter Van der Noord and also Owen Van Dijk who let me in (thank you) and a sparkling organizer whose name I can’t remember ( Joost? ).

thanks to all of you.

now, enough thanksfulness, in the coming weeks, I will talk about the rest of the session, starting right now with : POINTS!

Tags: augxl, session