The Tao Of Flash
the backing track. These snippets include vocalizations, mbira (thumb piano), some guitar licks, and a computer-generated bassline. The use of a head and hand section is, I hope, obvious in a piece of this nature.
Meet Jeffrey
Jeffrey Jullich is a young writer and critic I met online on the Wryting list. He's a bit of an intellectual trickster figure, acting often as a sort of giddy Socratean gadfly among the sometimes overly academic posts to Wryting. He's also a member of the Webartery list and Rhizome, both of which are dedicated to New Media Art.
Jeffrey (http://www.lewislacook.com/jeffrey.swf) is my homage to this character. It's also one of the few Flash pieces I've done in which the graphic element is comprised of devices entirely native to Flash. In this piece, I drew. The animation is a key element here, as is the music (all of which is made up of snippets I composed myself, just odd musical happenings I threw together on my nightly sojourns into madness). Like the fifth Negative Zero piece, its main interactive element is a series of draggable animated poems in my own scrawl, which float over the animation to provide a skittery, endlessly permuting texture. One of the buttons on the main interface links to a hacker page I found that almost exactly mimics the Yahoo home page. When I posted a link to this piece on the trAce Online Writing Community's web board, one adroit user wondered if that button was supposed to take you to that page: was this intentional, or was it the new and devilish Flash Player virus that had just started leaking through the network? I assured her it was my intention that users went to that page. Jeffrey is, after all, a trickster.
So...that's where I've been in the last month or so. The Tao of Flash is that it invades one's thinking as thoroughly as software can (almost as thoroughly as sex, but it would be quite non-human for this to happen, right? Right?). It has lent itself, in my head, to a certain conceptual kind of art; perhaps even the very realization of old school conceptual art, because in the case of pieces such as the ones above, there's no object at all, really: just numbers,
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