Article:

The Flash Community: Implications for Post-Conceptualism

Complimenting a broader international research paradigm shift, Electronic Literature scholars and practitioners alike have expressed a desire to expand the field to include deep collaborations with other disciplines. In achieving such a goal any original indigenous ideologies and aesthetics may be challenged. This dialectical tension between striving to be niche/identifiable/original in a mixed discipline economy faced with contemporary descriptors of ‘human experience’ such as Baumanr’s Liquid Modernity (2000), Antonelli’s Elasticity (2008) or even Turkle’s “life mix” (2011) remains key to facing this challenge. Using new interviews, emergent theories and archival resources this paper argues that the Flash community has already faced the issue of contemporary homogeneity driven by our on-going context of rapid technological change, and can be regarded as an exemplar of post-conceptual experimentalism. After a comparative analysis between the Flash Community and Electronic Literature the paper goes on to explore other new insights and considers the implications of being post-conceptual as a future opportunity and/or risk for Electronic Literature.