Flashbelt 2008

I joined Tim at the Association of Educational Publishers summit in Washington D.C., and l rapidly began to long for more detailed technical descriptions to underscore the dreamy futurism of the session speakers. The summit was, after all, a meeting of mostly non-technical publishers discussing the breakdown of the traditional publishing model, and pontificating about the what the industry is to do. Our friends at Shakespeare Squared made the outing quite enjoyable, but for a coder, the speakers lacked details. “Of course the iTunes model will apply to digital textbooks, of course the data will be stored in XML,” I thought,  “Let’s see some specs!”

Alas, no details were forthcoming.

Only days later, I got all the details I would ever ask for wrapped in a dreamier futurism. A trip home to Minneapolis gave me the opportunity to attend Flashbelt, a conference built to gather up programmers, designer, digital artists and inventive egg-heads, and put them in a room to inspire and teach each other. Well, mission accomplished. Shedding my tie for a more appropriate hoodie, I bit into the conference’s first small session. “Emergence”, Jeremy Thorpe’s discussion of complex systems and their unexpected “emergent” behaviors was an excellent way to get started. Built in Processing, he demonstrated several examples of a system he built called “The Color Economy”, in which image pixels could trade with other pixels for profit. Fascinating, beautiful work, and importantly, corporately indifferent. It was a scientific investigation, an artistic exploration, but who would buy it? Nobody.