September 01st 2005 | Brandon Flowers

Joshua Davis Workshop: Let Me Freak You Out

Many in the Flash community have seen a presentation by the very popular Joshua Davis, but few get the chance to spend a day with him let alone two. Davis touched down at Ryerson University, Toronto to teach about 40 of us. By lunch on the first day, my group agreed that the $400 ticket for the "Get Creative" workshop (July 29-30) paid for itself within the first hour.

Davis, who gives talks around the world, began the session by discussing his admiration of Japan, which he visits 6 times a year. He seemed surprised that he would be invited to Japan to speak about their relatively common cultural artifacts. He pointed out that because they - ornamental temples, tea houses, koi ponds in zen gardens - are in plain view, they become nearly invisible to those who see them on a daily basis, and that foreigners are more apt to notice and sing about their beauty.

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Davis likes to find patterns in foreign objects and create distorted, hand-drawn samples. He will feed these samples into his Flash engine that spits out acollage. With each strike of the space bar, he can change the canvas reflecting the rules of his art engine. While there is a great random factor in his art, it is these rules that control overall piece and limit the results. Davis notes that "within these restrictions, interaction design is easy".

Davis showed us how he bent L-systems to his devices in Flash by applying range of random values to their movement rules. The random values caused distortion to create new patterns. He enjoys the way that his art will "always mutate into something else". The random factor also worked well when applied to his swarming sine wave experiments. We watched an icon being chased by other icons that would lose or gain interest in the chase depending how he changed the twitch values. He jokingly referred to this behavior as a cocaine addiction; "The more coke you give them, the less inspired they are to chase to the leader."

Davis is constantly exploring his environment looking for new sources of inspiration. Taking his daughter to visit the New York Aquarium resulted in series of generative art pieces on jellyfish. In the jellyfish work, he nested his own components [that he has built up over the course of his lifetime] to control the color, composition, and animation. The components work together. For instance, the color selector component draws on a limited color palette ripped from a digital photograph (a 32-bit gif file) and randomly colors his artwork; "I'm lazy, I'll let Flash can color my art work." He produced some stunning results especially when the photograph contained a dark and brooding palette. Due to his preparation, the jellyfish would take on "whacked out and evil" tones but still remain complimentary. Posting works like these is what made him famous -- obviously too famous -- and Davis let us in own his personal reasons for taking them down, but also hinted that Praystation may be pregnant.

Along with the animated work, Davis work has also found its way into the print world. He produces posters, postcards, and occasionally massive installations. A recent show in Barcelona featured one of his murals printed at 19 feet by 8 feet. At first, the printer balked when presented with the illustrator file, which contained 170,000 vector points, until Davis admitted his prank and sent him the flattened Photoshop file. The printer actually believed that Davis has spent months adding each vector piece by hand until he explained that Flash did all the work for him within a few hours.

Davis knows all the tricks, even the undocumented ones. He has been working with Flash since Flash 1 (Future Splash), and has been influential its in evolution even asking Mike Chambers to bring back the "normal mode" (now called Script Assist) in Flash 8. During the workshop, Davis let us in a several undocumented features including the proper syntax for setInterval(). His surprises weren't limited to Flash, and shared one of his favorite video game perspective puzzles from Paper Mario.

Fortunately, his studio life is not a lonely one. He has managed to attract top talent to form The Department of Notation including Brandon Hall (who incidentally saved Davis from Paper Mario hell). Their company combines Davis' art and design savvy, with Hall's mathematician powers to form a symbiotic working relationship. They continue to push their experiments and share them with clients who get excited and usually want exclusive rights to develop it further. Davis explained that its "the type of work you project, is the type of work you get", and certainly looks like his clients desire elements of his art for their designs.

Anyone who attended the workshop could take away his basic recipe for his success: open your eyes to the overlooked beauty around you; experiment and polish your prototypes for client presentation; and finally work like hell. The next workshop will be in London, England in November, and you may just get the chance to ask him "how did you develop that dynamic xml-driven random text animation?"