The other day I realized that, this month alone, I've created five Flash pieces. This may explain a bit of my absence from the Suite in recent weeks; once the news of the corporate dilemma facing the Suite hit me, I did what I tend to do in such situations; I buried myself in work. Well, I figured, they're not paying me anymore, so if I slip out of schedule it's okay, right? Of course, it was rude of me to think this, but the world of new media was calling, and calling much louder than anything else at the time (except perhaps for Sallie Mae, the student loan people. Sheesh!).
While it's been my policy up until this point not to talk about my own work as regards new media here at the Suite, the time has come to fess up: yes, I, too, create new media. Or perhaps that's an understatement; perhaps it would be more accurate to say "I slather myself in new media creation:" particularly Flash works, which have become to me in the last few months what stone must have been to Rodin and light must have been to the Impressionists: an obsession. Actually, it's more like my high-tech toolshed: I can spend hours and days inside Flash. making buttons, synching animation, importing jpegs and transparent gifs and wav files, writing actionscript (the object-oriented programming language that gives Flash its interactive edge) and exploring new ways for the user to experience the work. I'm setting aside my policy this week to talk about what I've done; not for self-promotion, mind you, but more just to chronicle this particular odyssey I've been on.
So let's go over a few of these pieces, one by one:
The Negative Zero Collaboration
Negative Zero is a Flash/HTML/QuickTime collaboration I've been working on with renowned writer and web theorist Alan Sondheim. The piece began back in November, when Alan sent me some CD-ROM archives of his image, sound, and text work. Ho-ho! I chortled with glee, raw media to rework in Flash. So I set about taking Alan's images and sounds and combining them with my own knowledge of Flash and my own music and music-editing capabilities. This month, I produced two pieces for this collaboration: http://www.lewislacook.com/negative4.html and http://www.lewislacook.com/negative5.html
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Lewis laCook's New Media topic, please visit the Discussions page.