by Peter Lunenfeld

In times like these, we don't need manifestoes, we need utilities.

With that proviso, here are some aesthetic filters to try out on Flash movies, those Web-based entertainments that fall somewhere between art, design, and ephemera.

Flash is PopTech, the OpArt of the new millennium. Flash is PoliTech, the irrepressible joy and lightness of being digital after the boom economy has gone bust.

For years, we would go to high tech trade shows like SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI and see these nifty little algorithms and wish somebody would make something cool out of them.

During that same time we¹d tromp around European media festivals and think that if some of this stuff got out, it could find an audience.

We wondered how gaming culture would mutate as it was assimilated into pop culture at large, and we saw music videos move ­ stream really ­ onto the Internet.

With Flash, we saw the result of all of these elements mingling, and, to our surprise, it¹s been both more and less than the sum of its parts.

What we've ended up with is something dynamic, often beautiful, occasionally sophisticated, but not necessarily deep. Flash is animated Modernism, without the ideology; a medium of attraction without an avant-garde.

Flash is the deprecatory antidote to the self important pomposity of media art of 90s. Flash reminds us of the apartment gallery phenomenon of the last recession, an almost solipsistic commitment to making, no matter what the infrastructural support or community of viewers. Connected to the network, the computer is a media machine, and Flash is the reigning mode of expression.

Flash movies show up on your screen at the touch of a button, but that instantenaity brings with it a realization that you can terminate them with a single click. This translates the zapper aesthetic from the television in the den to the computer on the desk, to the projection on the gallery wall.

In the attention economy, who has time for all that contemplation the Rothko Chapel demands of you. In the era of the Electronic Baroque, there is no time for prologues. Flash offers realtime, instant launch aesthetics.

Flash makes us nostalgic for the classic narrative arc of the three minute MTV video of the 1980s.

The Flash entertainments gathered here move full bore from the get go, they never start with an empty stage for fear of the zapper.

Engaging with Flash is like entering a saved game, skipping the three dimensional, fully rendered "movie" intros tacked on to too many games like animatronic benshos, those fixtures of Japanese silent cinemas who shouted out the story to the audience.