Lev Manovich's "Generation Flash"

This reading was a reflection of Mr Manovich' son the evolution of mutlimedia arts, and the expanding variety of tools. he explained the difference between ART, MEDIA ART, and SOFTWARE ART, which I found very interesting, and continued on by comparing the types of people in these art categories and why they are there now, and how they are seen.
In the whole article, there were some points made that strucked me. I did not agree with everything that was being said.
One of these things was that the media artist was a "parasite who leaves at the expense of the comemrcial media". I thought he went kind of strong in this statement, it is true that media artists do reuse bits and pieces of other people's work but calling them parasites is an open insult. These people are still creating new works of arts, and that is nothing parasite-like.
This comment is based on his point that we, the present generation, are a generation of loopers. We do many things with loops: song beats are loops, commercials on the internet are little movie clip loops, popular songs are remixes of older ones, games' interfaces are based on repetition of actions with different levels......
One other example of him being to extreme in his sayings is that kids don't get about critiques now a days, they do their own things, freely in the comfort of their homes to please themselves...This is true in a sense that the internet culture created this whole new culture of anonymity, and they don't go for the fame or anything in that genre. But this is a huge generality, many many people have access to the internet now and create their pieces, games, sounds, etc....and then create legal companies, groups, member-ony websites, where they sell their name and products.
He went on by talking of specific projects lile UTOPIA, which I had never heard of before. he also mentionned a website that we had seen in class theyrule.net, and how simple and effecticve programming and interfaces can have a greater impact on the public when you make them do a good portion of the thinking. Given explanations/messages are just other sentences that you and I hear everyday, but you know that if you are taking the time to explore the website, then you are focusing on it enough to make the connections between the infos given to you, and you lay out the message, the way you want it to look like, it's briliant.
His last paragraph was dedicated to flash, and its impact on the art seen on the web today, how its low size and high quality graphics makes it available to everybody.....
His main focuses in that paragraph, though, was on one hand, the comparison to life and death: Trees, birds and clouds don't die; and o the other the "amplification": how one click/action leads to a sequence of others. but it's only the beginning of the flash age, more and more people handle this tool and works in general become more detailed and complicated.

THE CORPS POURATION

This movie is crazy. I had never seen it in class and wish we could have finished it in class......guess that means I have to download it now. ok, I. m back. What I really like about this movie was its structure. Unlike other dicumentaries, it did not start from a point, then go to the next, finding a link, and finding another one to another point, etc.... What the director did is to edit the movie as a checklist of everything a corporation is doing wrong to others and the planet. At first, I did not understand where this was going, as I had never heard or read anyting about the movie, but when the list was all checked, it was proved that since a corporation is dealt with as a person, then that person is a psychopath. A psychopath is a highly anti-social person who "is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism."
Each of these points was proved during the movie with interviews of actual CEOs, documantarist Michael Moore, top level executives, cirtics, historians....
Like Michael Moore's movies, this movie has a strong impact on you when you are done watching it, especially if it is the first time. But you soon realize that his technique to tell you these infos are just as deceitful, he gives you all the bad sides of corporations and sets up the flow of the informations given to manipulate your thoughts better. This is what a movie is about, take your mind away on a trip, no thinking involved, just cruising. THIS is a documentary, it should make you think, not scare you. I believe that such informations have a much better impact on the long run if the viewer does a fair portion of the analyzing.