Joshua Davis – my hero of Flash – in two excellent interviews (audio, video)
Joshua Davis is the reason why I’ve started to code. Seriously. Back in the late 90ies, the internet was a very nerdy and very ugly (but still very very interesting) place, websites looked like this [1] [2], and audio- or even video-integration was far away from what it is today. Websites were mostly static and focused strictly on delivering information, more or less. There was no beauty, no usability – which had also technical reasons, as the browser landscape of that time was the nightmare of every frontend guy, every browser was rendering stuff totally differently.
Anyway, in the last years of the 90ies Flash – basically just a browser plugin – started to take over the web, allowing developers and designers to create little snippets of pure rich-media containers, small (and sometimes even full-viewport-like) sections inside websites that hosted movies, animations, interactive movies, path-based animations, audio, etc, from TV-like comic show to 60 frames-per-seconds car-racing games: nearly everything was possible. Later versions even offered APIs to communicate with databases etc. Flash did in the late 90ies and early 2000s what HTML5 is more or less doing in 2014. Compared to the browser adaption, Flash is still superior to HTML5. Awesome!
[1] [2]
Within all this Flash madness coming up at that time, one guy has always drawn my attention: Joshua Davis, a tattooed punky skater guy, used Flash in a super-interesting kind of way, mixing designing and development by coding graphics. Hard to describe, but beautiful to see. His way of bringing chaotic logic to the web design scene was like nothing before: Using code and programmable patterns to create weird, but totally aesthetic graphics and videos, usually real-time generated. If you had a similar internet experience like me in the late 90ies and early 00s, then you will love the 1h 45m interview with him on the adoreable Life & Limb blog. This wonderful blog hosts highly recommendable interviews with very interesting people from the creative scene, photography, publishing, web and music.
More interesting stuff on his Instagram, Tumblr, Vimeo and Behance accounts and on his Homepage for sure.
Also make sure you look into this excellent 30m interview with the MIA guys (sorry, couldn’t find out who’s behind this project, but it looks very promising). Note the fact that they call him “The Godfather of Open Source”. :)