Flash: Building the Interactive Web

by Anastasia Salter, John Murray

Overview

How Flash rose and fell as the world's most ubiquitous yet divisive software platform, enabling the development and distribution of a world of creative content.

Adobe Flash began as a simple animation tool and grew into a multimedia platform that offered a generation of creators and innovators an astonishing range of opportunities to develop and distribute new kinds of digital content. For the better part of a decade, Flash was the de facto standard for dynamic online media, empowering amateur and professional developers to shape the future of the interactive Web. In this book, Anastasia Salter and John Murray trace the evolution of Flash into one of the engines of participatory culture.

Salter and Murray investigate Flash as both a fundamental force that shaped perceptions of the web and a key technology that enabled innovative interactive experiences and new forms of gaming. They examine a series of works that exemplify Flash's role in shaping the experience and expectations of web multimedia. Topics include Flash as a platform for developing animation (and the “Flashimation” aesthetic); its capacities for scripting and interactive design; games and genres enabled by the reconstruction of the browser as a games portal; forms and genres of media art that use Flash; and Flash's stance on openness and standards—including its platform-defining battle over the ability to participate in Apple's own proprietary platforms.

Flash's exit from the mobile environment in 2011 led some to declare that Flash was dead. But, as Salter and Murray show, not only does Flash live, but its role as a definitive cross-platform tool continues to influence web experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262325783
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	09/12/2014
Series:	Platform Studies
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Anastasia Salter is Assistant Professor of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore.

John Murray is a PhD student at the Expressive Intelligence Studio at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword vii

Acknowledgments ix

1 Rash and You 1

2 Animating the Web 17

3 Platform/er Programming 43

4 The Web Arcade 65

5 New Media Art 89

6 Free and Open? 113

7 Flash and the Future 135

Appendix: An Interview with Jonathan Gay 153

Works Cited 167

Index 177

What People are Saying About This

Aaron Delwiche

Salter and Murray have written a much-needed book that documents the history of a vital cultural product. The authors do a terrific job of using Flash to cast light on a larger media landscape. Highly unique, this is the best and most provocative work I've encountered about emerging technologies since the publication of The Cyborg Handbook.

Dene Grigar

Despite the news otherwise, Flash is not dead. Rather, as Salter and Murray's book Flash: Building the Interactive Web shows, it lives on through its influence upon HTML5 and contemporary 'expectations of web content development.' This book, therefore, is a fascinating study of one of the most important platforms of artistic expression of the early twenty-first century. A must-read for all scholars and artists of digital media.

Endorsement

Salter and Murray have written a much-needed book that documents the history of a vital cultural product. The authors do a terrific job of using Flash to cast light on a larger media landscape. Highly unique, this is the best and most provocative work I've encountered about emerging technologies since the publication of The Cyborg Handbook.

—Aaron Delwiche, Associate Professor of Communication, Trinity University

From the Publisher

Despite the news otherwise, Flash is not dead. Rather, as Salter and Murray's book Flash: Building the Interactive Web shows, it lives on through its influence upon HTML5 and contemporary 'expectations of web content development.' This book, therefore, is a fascinating study of one of the most important platforms of artistic expression of the early twenty-first century. A must-read for all scholars and artists of digital media.

—Dene Grigar, Associate Professor and Director of The Creative Media and Digital Culture Program, Washington State University Vancouver

Combining historical research, software studies, and a deep appreciate for digital creativity, Salter and Murray dramatically explore Flash—whose very ubiquity has heretofore made it transparent to media scholars—as the defining technology for a generation of artists, storytellers, game designers, and Web 2.0 companies.

—Mark Sample, Associate Professor of Digital Studies, Davidson College; coauthor of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

Salter and Murray have written a much-needed book that documents the history of a vital cultural product. The authors do a terrific job of using Flash to cast light on a larger media landscape. Highly unique, this is the best and most provocative work I've encountered about emerging technologies since the publication of The Cyborg Handbook.

—Aaron Delwiche, Associate Professor of Communication, Trinity University

Mark Sample

Combining historical research, software studies, and a deep appreciate for digital creativity, Salter and Murray dramatically explore Flash — whose very ubiquity has heretofore made it transparent to media scholars — as the defining technology for a generation of artists, storytellers, game designers, and Web 2.0 companies.