No, not the best Neil Young album ever, but rather my report from the superb Adobe – sponsored annual Flash conference Flash on the Beach (FOTB) held in Brighton today. This is the fourth year of FOTB and in that time has gained the status of the ‘must see’ conference for developers, designers, artists, web enthusiasts to witness some truly excellent talks and presentations from fifty of the most talented people in the business.

Due to attending only on the final day of the conference, I missed out on the (in!)famous FOTB parties this year, but was able to attend all the presentations that went on throughout the last day. For an excellent discussion on the previous FOTB days, I recommend you check out my fellow Collective colleague Marc Hibbins blog.

Over the coming days I shall do a series of FOTB based blog posts regarding the presentations and talks I found particularly enjoyable and interesting, beginning this blog post with Mario Klingemann’s talk, ‘Connecting the Dots’.

Klingemann’s talk was particularly interesting for me as it delved into many topics such as Cellular Automata which I studied during my Computer Science degree. The talk began with the idea of using basic mathematical tools (in this case a ruler and compass) to generate initially incredibly intricate geometric patterns, and eventually marrying the idea with some actionscript coding to attempt to solve age old mathematical problems. The example Klingemann used in this case was the problem of finding a pattern or rule in Prime Number prediction. He demonstrated his ideas by repeatedly plotting prime numbers initially in a square formation and then in increasing spirals, up to an unfeasibly large maximum. At this point he then went about tweaking various parameters of the spiral to create repetitive lines or streakes appearing throughout the pattern of numbers on screen, with the numbers forming themselves on or around these lines. I found it genuinely interesting and slightly dramatic in a ‘Horizon’ sort of way when he demonstrated perfect lines and spirals appearing, showing some idea of a possible means to predict patterns in prime numbers, and furthering his quest to solve the problem.

The talk advanced on to using Cellular Automata as a means to model number pattern problems in a ‘natural’ simulation, and then spotting patterns emmerging in the resultant visualisations. This is not the place to discuss Cellular Automata but in the past I have seen it used for myriad things, such as theoretical biological modelling, solving complex problems etc. Here, Klingemann demonstrate how using some of the rules associated with each cell (i.e. how a cell interacts with it’s immediate neighbours) can be linked to various visual parameters which are processed at run time, such as blurring and alpha effects to not only create some truly excellent visualisations but provide a means of detecting patterns. He demonstrated the trial and error approach to tweaking the parameters, and made the good suggestion of pumping ‘good’ settings to an xml file for later re-use, to approach something resembling a solution in the complex animation. Klingemann recieved a well deserved round of applause when he went from total visualisation anarchy to eventually landing on an impressive repeating animating pattern in the visualisation, to demonstrate it as effective means for number pattern detection. To my eyes I was probably more impressed with the resultant visualisation, but felt quite inspired by Klingemann’s enthuasiasm and entertaing style at this point.

The session ended with a some incredible ideas to compress image data to the point where the data could be packed into a 140 character tweet. Klingemann had to explain the concepts behind this in quite a hurried manner so will review the slides and notes on this part of the session first, at which point I will be in a more informed position to blog in a sensible manner on the subject. I shall also add relevant links to this post as soon as they are available. I would also recommend visiting his Flickr page, as it features many of the visualisations from his experiments.

In the next blog post in this FOTB series, I shall reflect on one of my favorite online web personalities, Seb Lee-Delisle’s experiences on putting the fun back into digital. This was a truly entertaining session and involved a lot of audience interaction, complete with 3-D glasses and glowsticks!

This was the my first year I attended FOTB and I must say, I certainly hope I am able to go for the whole 4 day duration next year, not least as I missed this years intro: