[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> RE: RHIZOME_RAW: GENERATION FLASH (2 / 3)

[Miles Nordin <carton@Ivy.NET>]

The driving force behind FLASH's internal design is being intensely
bandwidth-miserly.  Why?  Because people only care enough about
FLASHturbations to spend like 1 minute tops downloading them.  Not
only would people laugh their heads off if you asked them to _pay_ for
these cracker-jack prizes, but they won't even wait more than 60
seconds to get them for free.

That's why a 1Mbyte plug-in download is enough to totally kill off the
Revolutionary New Media Platform of the Future.  <shrug>.  Give me a
call when you rediscover the MBONE's whiteboard tools, or something
else that's actually useful.

The ``FLASH aesthetic'' is the aesthetic of the screensaver.

Can you imagine a FLASH version of ``El Fish,'' that old Windows 3.1
screensaver that used a genetic algorithm to breed fish?  Unlike
AfterDark's fishtank-plugin, the fish in El Fish would mate with each
other, and no two computers had the same fish.  It let you import and
export copies of fish from your tank to ``floppy disk'' (an ancient
pre-'net physical object for storing data) and share them with
friends.

Envision the re-release El Fish as net.art.  It would blow everyone
away.  It would be the greatest art project ever, because it ``mimics
biology'' or something, makes some kind of powerfully cynical
statement about the fundamentally Darwinian and thus retrograde color
of Biopower.  It would be enshrined on a Zenith 386 in the Guggenheim
museum.  

but this is EL FISH, a program mentioned once in PeeCee Mag ``First
Looks'' and then never heard from again.  I guess we were all just too
stupid back then to recognize the potential of El Fish to challenge
the traditional relations among humanity.

-- 
THE STARBASE MELMAC LIST IS FOR ALF FANFIC ***ONLY*** AND NOT A
SPRINGBOARD FOR YOUR LOONY FREE SOFTWARE ADVOCACY!
		-- Mr. Bad

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