The Tao Of Flash

Both pieces were challenging in very different ways. Negative 4 interacts with the user by allowing her to collaborate with Alan and me on the text; the first frame presents some lines from our text work, along with text fields for the user to enter their own response. This response is taken into the piece and animated, mixed in with the animated background.

Negative 4 is a prime example of the power of actionscript. Each of the user's responses is assigned to a variable; these variables, in turn are invoked within transparent text fields, and it's these text fields that are animated. This was my way to enrich the user's experience of the piece; the user, as opposed to being a passive recipient of the work, becomes a collaborator. This idea of collaborating with the user, and allowing space for the work to be experienced in a wholly unique way for each user, seems to be the direction much of my work and thought in general is going in.

Negative 5 features my first use of imported video sequences. The video is from one of Alan's QuickTime movies; it's a scene in which his wife, Azure Carter, scrawls the word "anthrax" on a chalkboard, then erases it with her bare hand; the last few frames are a pan of the camera down to that hand, smeared with chalk. This piece was very challenging because of the challenges of working with video; sure, it's only a few seconds of footage, but that few seconds in its original form was 1500 frames long, which is far too much for Flash to work with (and far too much filesizewise to expect any reasonable human being with any sort of life to download from the web). I had to pare this huge number down to about thirty frames. Then I drew over the frames using Flash's native drawing tools. Adding the draggable animated short poems (those moving bits of scrawl in my own hand, and, by virtue of their draggability, another fine example of actionscript at work) were the last stages of the work, as well as adding the music (some of which is a reworking of some sounds from an Atari emulator).

In all, the Negative Zero collaboration (still in

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