FLASHPOINT: "a critical point at which something or someone suddenly creates some significant action."
With flashpoints, we reach beyond already emerging media forms and devices. We focus on forces--social trends, new technologies, economic shifts--that have the potential to ignite and become the next moving edge of massive social change. In ExtremeMediaStudies.org, each flashpoint is a place where we share our earliest senses of raw forces that we don't even know how to talk about yet. So instead of talking about them, we use our sensibilities as media artists and designers to give some sort of creative expression to what our antennae or feelers are telling us, but which doesn't yet have words. And we invite you to do the same.
daily life
art
environment
consumer culture
business and economics
politics and power relations
technologies of media
We try to glimpse its presence in each of these spaces of living and we offer traces of its influence there.
Flashpoints, then, give sharable form to forces that we sense are gathering on the horizon. These forces (such as patterns of information flow, convergences of technologies, intensities of change, new desires and fears) are immaterial. Yet they are powerful. They shape the mediascapes that encompass us. They compose emerging contexts that media designers and users cannot ignore. With flashpoints, we make these invisible forces visible and offer them as inspiration for our own creative responses.
At the flashpoint, "what its next state will be turns entirely unpredictable. . . the system . . . is in ferment. It has gone 'critical'" (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 2002, pp. 109-110). At the flashpoint, all possible futures and paths are included within one another! It is a moment of pure possibility. What actually happens can't be predicted according to any known "laws" or theories.
DAILY LIFE
Something re-shapes daily life.
Something out of the corner of our eye. A whiff. An inkling. A possible pattern never before seen. A sensation. A direction toward which gathering energies seem to move. It's something that we don't yet grasp, but we think that those who study media need to create new knowledge about it very soon. Media designers can make something of it right now.
Our ideas for flashpoints come from whiffs of a deep core changes at the roots of daily life.
