Lev Manovich (2002), Generation Flash, http://www.manovich.net/TEXTS_04.HTM

'Flash aesthetics' is the term that Lev Manovich gives to describes the sensibility of a generation who have rejected the divisions of art and design in the tradition of the Bauhaus and replaced media criticism with software criticism. The Flash generation 'writes its own software code to create their own cultural systems, instead of using samples of commercial media' (2002). He acknowledges the category of 'software art' as indicative of this new dynamic practice that includes the use of Flash's ActionScript, Director's Lingo, Perl, MAX, JavaScript, Java, C++, and other programming and scripting languages. He says that 'suddenly, programming is cool' (we might add, not least, because Lev Manovich is writing about it). 

To examine this phenomena, he characterises the figures of the modernist artist, postmodern media artist and software artist. He thinks that the first two figures necessarily take existing media as a starting point, unlike the software artist who writes original code and use the computer as a programming machine. This is a ludicrously simplistic position, emphasized by the statement that: 'Programming liberates art from being secondary to commercial media' (2002). This appears to be a paradoxical position given that he is valorizing artwork made by the proprietary software Flash whatever its capabilities. At best, it is a confusion driven by the need to characterize software art as a paradigm shift in media arts (and moving image culture in particular) rather than see it in the tradition of experimental arts and literature more generally that deals with issues of its technical apparatus. 
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