Flash on the Beach
Well, another FOTB is done and gone. Honestly, after the first one being so fantastic, I arrive at each one with a bit of fear that I might have overhyped it to newcomers and even to myself. But for the third time in a row, John has pulled off the best conference of the year (at least out of the conferences I went to) and all the newcomers were generally blown away.
A few changes this year. Most obvious was leaving the Old Ship hotel and moving over to MyHotel. I have to say MyHotel was pretty cool. Probably one of the more unique hotels I’ve been in. I’m glad I was alone in my room, as the bathrooms offer virtually no privacy though. The bar was decent enough, and had it stayed open past midnight, probably would have been just fine. However, the early closing resulted in gangs of dangerous (not) geeks roaming around Brighton til the wee hours. Predictably, many ended up at the Old Ship anyway, and I heard some got kicked out one night. It was all cool though. Eating pizza while sitting on Brighton beach at 3:30 am will go down as one of my great memories of this trip.
There were also a lot more people present this year. Over 1,000. I think previous years were something like 600-800. So I’m glad John’s doing well. It really didn’t feel like that many, but I hope it doesn’t get too much larger. The smaller size is part of the charm.
Oh, and the speakers… usual great line up. I didn’t see quite as many as I did last year. One speaker couldn’t make it, so John asked six of us to come up with a 10 minute presentation for Tuesday – on Monday night. So I spent Tuesday morning putting that together. It was great fun. Myself, Ralph Hauwert, Andre Michelle, Joa Ebert, Carlos Ulloa, and Mario Klingemann all spoke until John snuck up behind us and dragged each of us away – if we didn’t see him coming first. It went over so well, he’s thinking of repeating it next year, and getting a big hook! 🙂
I think one of my favorite presentations was James Paterson. I’d seen him back in Toronto at FiTC something like 4 years ago. So creative and fun. Great inspiration session.
OK, and it has to be mentioned, the final session, full of controversy, Jonathan Harris. The session itself was pretty cool. I didn’t know his name, but knew several of his works, such as wefeelfine.org and tenbyten.org. He’s done lots of other cool things which he showed and were pretty interesting. Then he said something along the lines of, “Now I’m going to say a few things which might be hard to hear.” This alone didn’t sit well with me, like we were going to get a lecture where we were all going to be severely criticized. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much exactly what it was. The basic concept was that new media was in this “awkward groping stage” and that no masterpieces had been created. He said we were all either tinkerers and experimenters or selling our souls to do commercial work. That there were a lot of great communicators in the community, but none of us were really saying anything. None of us had any message. He had us ask ourselves the following questions:
OK, so it wasn’t easy to hear, that’s for sure. The brilliant part of it was that by opening with that line, any protest against what he was saying can be assigned to “hitting too close to home”. I need to remember that tactic next time I want to insult someone. Anyway, it was the talk of the evening. A lot of people were pretty pissed off. A few thought he was spot on. Most felt that what he had to say wasn’t that far off, but the way he came across was condescending and pretentious. I’m pretty much in the latter crowd. It did not at all come across as “hey guys, let’s become even better than we really are – we could do great things!” but much more as a scolding by a disappointed schoolteacher. Another aspect of why it work came to me last night – that Jonathan is not really part of our community. New media community, ok. But not so much the Flash community. I think if Hoss or Grant or even Natzke had gotten up and given the same speech (maybe smiling a bit instead of scowling at us the whole time) we would have given them a standing ovation. But here’s this guy that not many people know or know of personally, who comes and show us all this fantastic award-winning, gallery-showing stuff he’s done and then proceeds to tell us that everything we are doing is basically crap.
[Edit. I just wanted to clarify one thing here, as it’s been picked up on a few times, and reading it over, this last bit came across quite differently than I intended it. I’m not saying that because Jonathan is not part of the community, he can’t say anything or teach anything to us. Not at all. I’m not criticizing him by calling him an outsider. Not saying “how dare he?” This was merely an observation / speculation, that criticism is sometimes easier to take from someone you know, than someone coming in from outside. I had just had the thought that if someone like Hoss had said the same things, there would have been little or no controversy. I’m not saying that’s necessarily even a good thing. Just a possible fact.]
Anyway, nothing like a good bit of controversy and something to talk about to end off the conference! 🙂
OK, and last bit of news… The British are coming! The British are coming!
Flash on the Beach invades Miami! I don’t know much about it, but it’s in April. 5-8 I believe. I’m sure you’ll hear much more about that in the coming weeks.