by
Benek Lisefski
page
1 of 5
exhibit52.com
Joshua
Davis is an explorer of Flash. Like Louis and Clark, he has traversed
uncharted territory in the Flash design world. He follows no map,
but makes his own. Without him much more of the continent of Flash
development would still be left undiscovered. As much as an 
individual
can, Davis is pushing the medium. He wants to make the internet
a more organic reality. He wants to change the way we experience
the web.
Davis doesn't watch much TV, he rarely surfs the web, and he prefers to work with the hum of his computer as his soundtrack. His inspirations come from nature, from what he observes around him, and the mundane. Rather than trying to fit his ideas into the boundaries of Flash, he strives to stretch those limitations to meet his vision. It's a life of experimentation; a life of questions and confusion, but he wouldn’t have it any other way: "My mother gave me this quote once, 'It is more rewarding to explore than to reach conclusions; more satisfying to wonder than to know; and more exciting to search than to stay put.' I've personally tried to carry this idea with me through my whole life."
The Power of Confusion
As a designer, what inspires me most about Joshua's work is the mentality in which he creates it.
"Mentalities are ways of thinking: a philosophy or set of constructs or beliefs that guide our rational thought. Anomalies defy our beliefs: An anomaly is something abnormal, or something not easily classified. They are the wormholes in the universe of life experiences; as an artist I have found that the most useful mentalities make room for as many anomalies as possible…Most of the time I’m very confused."
Out of this confusion springs ideas and discoveries that push Flash
to new limits and blow other designers away. Davis embraces confusion
because for him it is the greatest source of inspiration, "The
more confusing the idea, or sound, or web-site, or architecture,
or cities, or people, or nature, or anything - the more
I'm prone to keep looking at it, trying to discover and uncover
things. In the end it's about exploration." It is the constant
state of exploration that drives Davis to create.
"If I ever truly understood all I do in with Flash, or with my life in general, I’d probably quit—because that would mean I had lost interest in exploring all the things Flash can do if I push it. No offense to Macromedia, but I have really tried to bring Flash to its knees. Really break it. Slam it. Crash my computer. It’s only in breaking things—in the anomalies—that I find the accidents that in the end become techniques."
From early childhood we are taught that the nature of life is to grow. Clearly, Davis understands this principle from the deepest level of experience. His nature is in exploration, and he is only content when his explorations lead to a growth in understanding of the possibilities of Flash. Yet even more fulfilling than understanding is the raising of new questions, the spark of new explorations, and the discovery of accidents that lead him in places he may have never thought to go on his own.
Anomalies,
accidents, and randomness are vital parts of Davis's working method
for developing Flash, but they also show up as themes in his finished
work. In one of his newest collaborative projects Davis created
a system that would generate random compositions based on rules
and patterns that he programmed into the system.
"I spend like 4 hours writing the program and then I sit up for like 3 days going 'Jesus Christ! This is great!' And so it's kind of changed how I think about art and design. I've let go of some of the control and now the computer has the control and it generates these ideas or patterns that perhaps I never would have though of."
The project, a collaborative effort between Davis and developers James Paterson (www.presstube.com), and Derrick Hodgson (www.madreal.com) was aptly titled Accident Happy. The result, a set of computer-generated prints, was exhibited recently at Alfred University in New York.
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