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as well as the work i produce and discuss here i also have a commercial life too. i’m a freelance flash & flex developer and maintain a professional blog on just that subject over at richtextformat.co.uk. the subjects discussed on these two blogs occasionally overlap and this is certainly the case with a presentation i witnessed last week given by jonathan harris at brighton’s annual ‘flash on the beach‘ conference. it turned out to be a very controversial lecture and everyone seems to want to give their impression of it, including me.

now if you don’t know who jonathan harris is, don’t worry, you’re in good company; most of us didn’t either, and that included the speakers, most of whom are international geek superstars. we found out though and i was pleased to discover that he was the ‘we feel fine‘ guy. if you don’t know what ‘we feel fine‘ is, very briefly it’s a lovely bit of work done in processing that searches the web for blogposts that feature the phrase ‘i feel’ and displays small sections of these posts in different and quite touching ways.

i am the copywriter for flashbrighton, my local flash user group, and in that capacity i gave a talk to the group a year or more back entitled ‘introduction to processing’. i spent an hour going over some processing basics and a second hour showing some existing processing apps. the url was sadly down at the time but my intention was to finish this showcase with ‘i feel fine’, as i felt it was the best work i could find at the time built using the language. i still feel that it’s both one of the best processing apps out there and jonathan’s best work, and i really recommend that you go take a look at it.

jonathan showed us this and some other, in my opinion, less interesting pieces. at this point in his talk he had been onstage for about an hour and it felt like he was about to wrap up but he felt like he had more to say and thus ended the talk with some fairly barbed critique which, in the days following the close of the conference, stirred up a veritable hornet’s nest of controversy.

so why was that, what did he say? let’s have a look at that now. some of this i remember but sadly my memory isn’t the greatest in the world so i’m also calling on a text document on erik natzke’s site where erik has roughly transcribed some of jonathan’s messages:

1. firstly jonathan remarks how it seems to him that movements go through an early crude period, a juvenile experimental period and a mature classic period, pointing out that flash is currently in the second, experimental phase, making it’s practitioners mere ‘tinkerers’;
2. next he says that those currently most capable to yield the strength of that language aren’t actually saying anything with it “like someone trying to memorize the dictionary blurting out words with little understanding of their meaning, occasionally making a sentence but incapable of constructing a paragraph”;
3. then we get to see a series of questions that we could test our work against to see how much emotional depth it has;
4. and finally he tells us that nothing he’s seen, including his own work, can be called a ‘masterpiece’ - which i take to mean passing the questions in point 4 above -  and that “there are no [flash] virtuosos” but “there could be”

here are some images documenting the second and the third of those points:

(images courtesy of flickr user schobi)

so what’s wrong with this? what has caused such uproar, with some people literally fuming mad? i thought jonathan had some interesting things to say but i’ve also heard a number of criticisms so what i want to do is try to address those that i’ve heard.

‘tinkering’ is what drives flash innovation and shouldn’t be criticised

two points here. firstly, everything should always be open to criticism. if something is strong it will easily weather criticism and if it is weak then the criticism will be deserved. sacred cows create nothing but stagnancy.

secondly, jonathan clearly pointed out that he felt flash was in its ‘juvenile’ experimentation phase. such a phase is bound to be characterised by ‘tinkering’ and therefore that’s fine. it seems to me that the problem here is one of communication. my understanding of this is that jonathan was saying that if we spend our entire lives tinkering we will never get anything finished and that would be an awful shame.

you can look at flash - and technology generally - in the same way you might look at pre-renaissance painting or black and white silent movies: technically speaking it’s damn good but there’s still a long way to go before it gets really, really good and a failure to see that is a simple failure of imagination. would it not be possible to draw parallels between the ‘experimental’ work the papervision team are doing to shoehorn 3D into flash and the ‘experimental’ work brunelleschi did in sketching the ruins in rome to invent one-point perspective? not a perfect analogy, i know, but the point is that papervision and perspective are both tools; as in a means to an end, not an end in themselves. ultimately the stand-out pieces from the renaissance now are not the invention of one-point perspective itself but the works that went on to utilise it, like masaccio’s trinity. likewise the great work the papervision team are doing may not, when we look back 20 years hence, be what we remember about flash at this point in history, it may well be that some great project that uses papervision will be the thing that we seize on instead.

there is too, i think, a third point subtly hidden away in this discussion, one i took quite a long time to really appreciate. tools are restricting. this can have positive and negative ramifications but if the creative tools at your disposal are just a limited bunch chosen by and made available to you by a large corporation via a series of dropdown menus in a piece of software, then there are a whole raft of political issues underpining the discussion which, for some people, might be serious enough to raise doubts as to whether you should even be using the tool at all. this is a whole other area that i don’t want to get into, i think it’s just worth pointing out that this is a perfectly valid point [of view] and one that we should treat seriously, should someone have the gumption to get up and start talking about it.

people do understand and use the language and are doing amazing things with it

they undoubtedly are. giotto was painting some magnificent work prior to the invention of one-point perspective but the works that come after are just enormously improved as a result of it. again, lets’s try not to let a lack of imagination about what is to come lead us into a false sense of how good things are right now. most people thought the original ‘donkey kong’ was amazing when it was first released. now though, whilst they do acknowledge the historical importance of games like ‘donkey kong’ they tend not to be blown away by them anymore. our industry is young and its history is barely written yet.

criticising flash in purely artistic terms excludes and ignores a whole raft of other important work

jonathan is well within his rights to pitch his presentation and his criticism at a subset of the flash community. the impression i got was that he was doing just that and not damning every last app that runs in the flash player. did anyone criticise james paterson for not considering the needs of developers when he planned his whole presentation around his, let’s be honest, great little animations? likewise did anyone take issue with, say, ben stucki because he concentrated solely on flex techniques? no, because that would have been stupid. jonathan can talk about whatever he wants to. had he chosen to talk for an hour just about flash’s ‘textfield’ class that would also have been fine. odd, but fine.

not everyone can, wants to or should be out to produce masterpieces

not everyone who works with flash was in the brighton dome listening to jonathan. again, jonathan is well within his rights to assume he’s got an elite section of the flash community in front of him who aspire to doing the very best with the technology possible.

jonathan is just a privileged rich kid

jonathan might well come from a privileged background, i don’t know. one of the pieces he showed centred around a trip he took to a whaling community in northern canada, another around a prolonged spell in bhutan. these projects were frankly a bit silly - and in the case of the latter arguably an exercise in religious and environmental desecration - and jonathan should probably know better.

that said, i’ve known ignorant rich people and considerate rich people, ignorant poor people and considerate poor people. whilst money and background obviously do have a profound impact on people i’m not really sure what anyone expects them to do about it. if you were born into a rich family would you stop yourself from going on whaling trips to canada because you thought people with less money and opportunity would feel aggrieved by it? would you permanently give your inheritance away so that you would be forced to support yourself through a nine-to-five job and get a lasting taste of what the ‘real world’ is about? probably not. i would imagine most rich kids are doing things on a daily basis that are far more morally corrupt than, say, taking photographs of a village community catching and slicing up a whale.

thinking about flash in terms of masterpieces and virtuosos is inappropriate

this may well be a good point. this is the classic trap of understanding and criticising the new technology with the concepts and the language of the former. masterpieces and virtuosos are two words that even themselves apply to differing realms, broadly speaking; the first to the visual arts, the second to the musical. i realise it does happen but describing a symphony as a ‘masterpiece’ and a highly skilled sculptor as a ‘virtuoso’ just doesn’t sound quite right. again, i think jonathan just wanted us to be aware that there is so much more yet to be done and to disuade against premature backslapping.

far from being inspiring, jonathan’s session was just depressing

i’m not at all convinced jonathan was trying to make us feel worse, not in the long run anyway. i think his approach was a kind of call to action in hope that we might collectively raise the bar with our work. some people favour the technique of being hard on people in order to get better results. i think that was the idea here.

jonathan is immature, condescending, arrogant and glory-hunting

this is a tricky one and, if i understand all the feedback i’ve read about jonathan, the thing that they feel truly aggrieved about. some people have had the opportunity to talk to jonathan on a number of occasions and have come to certain - in some cases fairly damning - conclusions on this front. i’ve never met the man so i don’t know, all i have to go on is what i saw at the brighton dome.

you can argue that he was trying to provoke a response. if so he certainly managed it. but also, if that was his game, then you’d have to say that was a touch immature, i’d agree.

you can argue that there was a certain po-faced element in his body language and tone of voice. again, if there was any aspect of artifice about that you’d have to say that was a touch condescending, i’d agree.

you can argue that the very fact that he claims that even his own work isn’t a masterpiece is evidence of his arrogance. but then what would he do if he did think his own work was a masterpiece? if he says so he’s putting himself on a pedestal above the rest of us but if he thinks the opposite - as he claimed to - then he’s branded as having fake-modesty. either way he appears to be arrogant so he’s in a kind of lose-lose situation there, a situation born of the fact that it is generally tacitly assumed that only someone who actually produces masterpieces has the right to identify and/or critique other masterpieces. this is the kind of nonsense that holds a lot of people back from saying what they really think. if i am served a meal in a restaurant which i think is lousy, am i precluded from saying so on the grounds that whilst it might be true the meal, being produced by a professional chef, is still probably a good deal better than i could cook? no, that would be ludicrous.

and i’m really not able to pass any judgment on his ‘glory-hunting’, i just don’t know the man or his history.

questions of this nature come down to judgments based on hunches and intuition, two notoriously poor tools. my feeling is that jonathan was trying to come across as genuine and positive but possibly just misjudging this a bit, with spectacularly bad results in some cases.

in conclusion

there’s a few points i want to finish on:

our technology has a long, long way to go yet, so its ok to be a bit critical

i recently presented a session at barcampbrighton about the history of the right angle. part of that presentation featured a full-width nighttime aerial photograph of los angeles. the full illuminated grid of the city’s road network was a beautiful thing and i pointed out that i had never seen a piece of generative artwork even nearly as beautiful and that there are two reasons for this: firstly los angeles is an enormous, complex city and secondly generative art is in its infancy. a really big generative artwork is still currently only measured in widths of thousands of pixels and as such has a long way to go before it can match the subtle and complex beauty of the aerial photograph.

even ignoring all that, if someone shows a piece of work to 100 people and 99 of them think it’s awesome whilst one guy at the back thinks it’s a bit shit actually, whilst all 100 opinions might not be all that uplifting, they are all perfectly acceptable.

free speech is great

let’s let everyone say just exactly what they want to. we don’t have to agree with every loonpot that stumbles by but we could at least listen to them and, if we don’t like what they’re saying, just calmly say so. we don’t have to get angry and rant about it. if you really think someone is being stupid or immature or whatever then what have you really got to fear from them? let them dig their own grave rather than have them adversely affect your own health.

that said, historically speaking cutting harshly across the facade of established belief has done enormous good for the world. when committing the heresy of proposing a heliocentric solar system galileo was dragged before the pope and banned from teaching. i’m far from saying that jonathan’s contribution to mankind is on a par with galileo’s, i’m simply saying that if you’ve got something to share with the world, it doesn’t matter if it’s stupid, average or brilliant, it’s generally good to share it. it would be better if it weren’t stupid or average, but still, it’s good to share it.

alright, fair enough, jonathan was a bit patronising

i do actually agree with most people on on this. its a shame because the delivery will now cloud the content and the content had some good stuff in it. in essence, jonathan just wants us to push on, produce stronger and stronger work. surely that’s what you want too, isn’t it?

Tags: Flash on the Beach, flashBrighton, FOTB, Jonathan Harris, SussexDigital

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under art, events, news, processing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.