FITC had its first FlashintheCan conference in Toronto in 2002 and has since grown to become one of the most important events of its kind. What initially started as a Flash-only conference has expanded over the years to include sessions about other relevant technologies such as Processing and openFrameworks just to name a few. Even if the event is a Flash conference at its core, the broader breadth of topics is, in my opinion, a welcome approach since it’s undeniable that technologies other than Flash are better suited for certain types of work.

This conference concept lined up perfectly with one of the common threads across sessions: using the best technology for the job. The work shouldn’t be about the platform that it’s built on but about the goal that we’re trying to accomplish and the path to get there. Like Yugo Nakamura said, once you use the tools long enough and master them, they become transparent hence being able to focus on the concept.

One of the big themes of the conference was definitely Generative Art. Flash has helped foster a technically savvy and über creative community that manages to repeatedly surprise by creating work that pushes the boundaries of the technology while creating stunning visuals.

This was apparent in sessions like Erik Natzke’s Art of Play where he showed some of his amazing artwork entirely created by code. This visually stunning work is a testament, in my mind, that technology and design can perfectly complement each other. Mario Klingemann’s talk titled Welcome to the Sideshow also followed this trend. After going through some of the things he finds inspiration in (Pulp Art, order and association of objects, subversive creative movements, etc.) he talked about the process he went through to evolve his ideas to create some technically masterful and beautiful pieces of art, also with code.

Another recurring theme was finding inspiration in Nature. For example, Natzke showed personal photographs that influenced the color properties and compositions of his work. Robert Hodgin’s Cinder simulations were also inspired by Nature. Hodgin’s quest to mimic the complexity of the natural world took him down a path of iterative exploration that eventually lead him to some of the most astonishing visuals I’ve seen in a long time. Robert explored magnetic properties, reaction-diffusion systems and used Voronoi algorithms to achieve some of his real-time simulations.

Some of the sessions also went beyond the confines of the screen. In a session titled Harnessing the Abundance, Mike Creighton inspired us with his use of open-source technologies to capture his gestures when drawing and then using that data to create visualizations in the digital world. More info about his project here.

Also, in his talk called Eyes can Hear, 5 ways, Jared Ficklin entertained the audience with his experiments with sound. From a smoke cannon and a flame box to an augmented reality porta-potty, which did not lack a sense of humor. Ficklin also showed some context-aware music visualizations. For example, he showed an equalizer projected on a building and several sound visualizations on a wall that took into account the shape of each individual brick.

Overall, my general impression of the conference was that it was less about being exposed to very specific technical solutions to particular problems and more about the thinking behind some of the most brilliant work out there. Much like a little window into the minds of some of the most skilled and creative people in the medium. At least those were the most inspiring sessions to me.

I also had the chance to speak at FITC for the first time in my session called Innovation through Collaboration. It was apparent to me that this is a relevant and interesting topic to many.

Thanks so much to everybody who attended my session and provided such positive feedback. As promised, here is a link to my slides and to my recent articles about prototyping. I’d love to hear (in the comments below) what you liked, didn’t like and what you would have wanted to see that I didn’t show.

A big thanks goes to Shawn Pucknell and Lisa Walters for inviting odopod to join this great event. It was a real honor to be part of such an amazing line-up. This was the first time that FITC was in San Francisco and it was awesome to be both inspired and humbled on home turf.