On Generation Flash
2005.12
Montreal [ Canada ]
Lev Manovich's Generation Flash article was first released in 2002. It is available on the author's Website. Click here for a direct access to the articles page.
The title of this text relates to the popular software developed by Macromedia at the end of the nineties. Flash has had an incredible growth in order to become, today, the most popular plugin within Internet users.
Here is a short biography of Manovich copied from his Website on December 10th, 2005:
Lev Manovich is the author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He is a Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
The following reflections are Felix Faucher's reaction to the text.
I first red this text in 2002 while browsing through public folders of computer design classes on the Concordia University web server. At the time I did not know who Lev Manovich was but downloaded the text as I was myself an autodidact web designer who had been blown away by the possibilities that Flash and Html offered at the end of the nineties.
Modernism
The first point that interests me in what Manovich argues is the return of the Flash Generation to a Modernist form of Design as defined by the Bauhaus.
The Bauhaus was a very influent Design School from Germany in the 20s and 30s whose Design, among others, was characterized by the use of grids and by the application of the form follows function principle.
I believe Manovich is on the right track when he mentions that there are some software/bandwidth issues at the source of the renewed Modernism among Flash Generation designers. Although he argues it's not just those circumstances that brought to this situation, I'd like to give some examples that, in my case, directed towards a form of minimalist/form follows function sensibility in my web based graphic work.
I was born in 1978 and remember my dad buying his first computer, a British Sinclair 1k, when I was around 3. The 1k stood for 1 kilobyte of memory. As time passed by and computers switched in my dad's home office, I saw a Sinclair 2k make its appearance followed by a Commodore Vic 20. With the Commodore I was introduced to my first experience in Computer assisted drawing with a software called Logo. To draw a line, you had to enter the angle of rotation of your cursor in relation to your last vector and the length of the new stroke in points. At this point I was around 5 and already really enjoyed drawing by hand, so this way of drawing with a keyboard and a monochromatic monitor seemed like a waste of time that lacked the spontaneity of pencil and paper.
Nevertheless, it did marked me profoundly, and made me realize that for a computer it wasn't as easy to draw lines as to make sums or solve other arithmetic problems. At least it was harder for me to achieve it.
Years later, with the introduction of Paint on our first Windows enabled PC, I learned to work on the pixel grid. The software only allowed a resolution of 72 dots per inch and the development of details required the user to zoom in until we could only see big squares on the screen. I did a whole series of skateboarding related bit mapped drawings with paint, and even though I could not work with vectors yet, I could see many advantages to drawing with a computer. The mouse really improved the experience and the presence of colors instead of a gray, green or orange pixel glow on a black background made the screen much richer in visual information.
At this point, I learned that a professional software by the name of Illustrator existed. My dad brought me a couple of times to the printshop were he worked and instructed me on how to draw on a Mac. Being able to control the curves with the use of the little levers was an incredible improvement on the pixel based Paint. The laser prints of my drawings looked incredibly sharp. Yet there was no way the 10 year old kid I was would get either an Apple Computer or a software like Illustrator, both high-end professional tools being extremely expensive. There wasn't a thing such as software exchange at the time, and we would only get dial-up Internet home several years later.
So digitally painting I was, trying to draw curves with pixels as the smallest unit, until in high school I got to work with Corel Draw and later with Illustrator, to ultimately discover Flash thanks to a programmer fellow in 1999.
Why telling this story? First to say that Flash Generation kids have several reasons to be attentive to the pixel grid and to the economy of data size. If I am aware that there is something happening behind the surface of the keyboard and the screen whenever I draw or type on a computer, a lot of people my generation do, and no matter how powerful computers and the Internet's bandwidth becomes, somebody who has seen a computer of 1k in his/her life, I argue, will be more likely to keep information on a computer to functional proportions for enhanced efficiency.
At the time of writing this I'm using a bare bones text editor. The weight on my hard drive of this text to this point is of 8 Kbs. Now I copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word: 36 Kbs. Same information, 450% of the disk space, or, if you will, four and a half times more expensive in storage devices. At this level it might seem trivial, but if the kilobytes were megabytes or gigabytes, then it would be worth considering, even with the superlative computers the industry pushes on us.
This consciousness of an effective form of data transmission was specially critical at the time of slow dial-up Internet connections. Today high speed Internet is now widely available. I can testify that in Peru, South America, high speed Internet is accessible at any street corner, anywhere in the country, for as low as 50 cents an hour. Yet, even though not as crucial as before, efficiency, code economy and programming rigor remain positive assets as browsers are sensitive to lousy or extra coded pages. Moreover, according to Concordia University teacher Santo Romano, Search Engine Optimization also welcomes strict code.
These are a few reasons why the austerity of the Bauhaus Design might be relevant to the Flash Generation. Sure enough, not all of the new designers apply to this rules. The artists who don't want to get their hands dirty in programming can make use of a variety of software that will generate code for them, while they will only have to push icons and manipulate graphic elements on the software WYSIWYG navigation surface. This method of working though, specially for the web, results in unpredictable and inconsistent outcomes (What you see might not always be what the user gets). How can you trust a visual interface on a software for the layout of an Internet page when every single browser processes margin, border, padding, and font measurements differently? Displayed Html is not fixed like ink on paper, and software that generates code usually makes too much of it, always more than what is necessary and in a non-ordered way, making websites bigger and slower on the backstage.
While laying out from pure code, however, the process feels more like the Logo program that I used on my Dad's Vic 20 around 1982. We are back to our good old keyboards to create visual output. You need to talk the language of the computer for it to place your visual elements where you want. This also tends to promote an austerity in Design, since precise measures will naturally lead to efficient use of space.
As of July of 2005, the W3 Schools statistics for screen displays showed that an increasing portion of Internet users(55%) had their resolution set to 1024 x 768. Yet there is still a quarter of the users who still navigate with 800 x 600 displays, and even those who have a higher resolution often have other software running when they browse the Net, like instant messaging or music programs, which utilizes a portion of the screen.
These are good reasons to keep web Design dimensions under a strict regime of functionality, yet try to be creative with those parameters in mind.
Think Loop
Manovich isolates an important aspect of the Flash aesthetics in the unit of the loop. The loop as the new index for reality since the democratization of photo manipulation software. Indeed, the terms in which Roland Barthes talks about photography as a form of evidence in "Camera Lucida" do not prevail after the advent of Photoshop.
The Flash Generation and the youth in general don't buy into photography as a proof of reality anymore. They probably are more affected by the images they see that what they acknowledge, but at least the skepticism is well established regarding the authenticity of the photographs they are being presented just as they don't take the politicians or religious speeches as automatic truth.
An interesting representation of this idea is in the Harry Potter movies, where photos in newspapers and books loop endlessly. The interactive input by the user which software needs to change its looping state is not present in the video loops but the paintings framed on the walls in the movie do allow this interaction between art piece and viewer, a fascinating relationship that becomes possible with new technology.
Yet the loop does not hold the same position now that it did back when this text was written. Here is an aspect of Flash Aesthetic culture where the landscape has changed in the past 4 years. Specially since Manovich states from the start that his article is not about Flash made websites but rather to the Flash Generation aesthetics that are found in websites made with other technologies as well, such as Shockwave, Quicktime and other Web multimedia formats
If the other multimedia formats that tried to compete against Flash, such as Accel, Adobe Live Motion and even Macromedia's own Shockwave and Director, have pretty much disappeared, Quicktime and Flash now resort to streaming in a much larger proportion than before, making the loops longer, thus paralleling the progression revealed by Manovich of the pre-cinematic visual devices of the nineteenth century.
The age of the long Flash intro animation (Splash), a form of loop in itself since we had to see it every time we would access the website, is now over. No more animated gifs that loop endlessly are tolerated. It's as if as the amount of information available on the internet increased, the audience had become more demanding.
Just like cinema had a slower pace 50 years ago, the advent of rich content such as the BMW films in 2001, made by world class directors and available exclusively over the Internet, has opened the door to higher expectations, and Internet Art suddenly progresses thanks to commercial Art. This could be related to some of Marshall McLuhan's quotes, such as Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world (Book of Probes 131) and Advertising is the Art form of the 20th Century (Book of Probes 128).
Another company that has been pushing the envelope in terms of user interactivity for the past years is Absolut Vodka. In 2002, Absolut Director already provided very advanced user input in the creation of online audio visual works.
Software Art
The increasing power of Flash's ActionScript is among the reasons why Internet content, even in a traditionally graphic based environment such as what Flash provides, tends to move from the timeline based, linear film sample navigations to dynamically created content that is visually unique to every user. A group of designers that Manovich talks about, Futurefarmers, do just that with their website www.theyrule.net. Every user creates his/her dynamic visual content on the stage, and the resulting creation can be printed.
Tokyo's Digital Artist and Designer Yugo Nakamura (www.yugop.com) has been coding hundreds of examples of dynamic visual Flash content for years, only this content was made as an experimental laboratory more interesting for its technical and formal elements than for its content.
The work of Amy Franceschini, as described my Manovich when he talks about UTOPIA, is Serious business behind a playful facade. It is Tetris that meets Marx that meets data mining that meets the club dance floor. The visual representations of invisible links in They Rule or UTOPIA are also ways to disseminate information in the manner that is the most natural for humans to grasp: visually.
Being told that company X's board of directors comprise people who sit on other board of directors doesn't quite gives us the immediate impact that THEY RULE showcases. Here the austerity of the initial stage helps emphasizing the relations and give the user an incentive to manipulate and develop a web of links by learning at the same time how the power is organized.
The work of such designers/programmers does dig deep into programming and dynamic content, which in turn call for Modernist visual content. When you create curves, lines and content in general from user input, the backstage code is somewhat reminiscent of the Logo software on the Vic 20.
Although this kind of work exist on the net, most websites making use of Flash only use a small fragment of the power of ActionScript, and the creation of true dynamic visual content online (not only switching the colors of cars or shoes in a catalogue) is only at its beginning stage.
-Felix Faucher