Digital Art

[axcho]

Thanks for the links. I'll investigate them more thoroughly once I have time.

I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say I "have missed A LOT of things done with flash." I'm sure there is a lot of interesting stuff out there that I don't know about yet, and I don't mean to dismiss it. I hope I didn't give that impression. I just meant to explain one little subset of all possible and worthy Flash things, which I am most interested in making myself. It's just what I'm interested in. I don't mean to suggest that it's the only thing worth making, or that other people should be doing it.

I thought that was a very interesting and insightful remark, that what you care about (and also what the demoscene is about?) is "making the beauty of math visible." I would certainly say that is a worthy goal and motivation. And it clarifies my own position. I think my goal is similar, and maybe the same in some places, but I'd say for me it is "making the beauty of nature accessible."

I am inspired by the natural world. I like minimalism, and distilling something to its essence, but I think that maybe I am less inspired by math in its theoretical purity. Though maybe it's just a matter of what I've been exposed to so far. I really started appreciating the beauty of plants only after reading about L-systems, and I am fascinated by cellular automata. CAs are abstract, but I imagine a deep and fundamental connection between the principles of these toy systems and the basic dynamics of the universe, which makes them very compelling to me. And also they make pretty designs and they're fun to play with.

I haven't spent much time playing around with mathematical systems though, so I'm not very familiar with what is possible. And overall, I tend to be inspired by concrete applications more than by theoretical beauty (where "concrete applications" refers to games or artistic pieces, basically things that normal people can form emotional connections to). I guess I appreciate mathematical beauty less in itself than in its potential, the potential to be part of an experience that encourages people to associate emotion and personal meaning with it. It's about making the concepts, or feel, or whatever, personally relevant to people. So hmm, I guess our goals are not too far apart.

Anyway, what were we doing again?

Oh yeah, we're trying to make a procedural Flash demo. I'll try thinking of ideas. And I'll start recruiting. Have you seen this guy's work? There's a whole network of Flash tinkerers on deviantART. I'll post a comment to see if he's interested in contributing. I can also make a thread about it on Kongregate, since I know there are a couple people who might be interested.

[EDIT]
Kongregate thread posted.