As I go deeper into actionscript, doing less and less actual work in Flash and more and more work in notebooks and Storyspace, I find that thinking about the spatial elements in terms of x, y, and z (a simulated point) points is critical to my understanding of the space I’m dealing with. In Flash MX/04, the stage can be fairly empty while much of the horsepower goes into Math.cos and array building, to name just a few methods.

But it’s more than just the math and organizing functions; it’s imagining and planning how a movie clip, say a circle or a word, will interact on a frame nested in some other clip and where they all “live” in the file. It’s fun to play with and associates to editing poetry in a lot of ways.

Which reminds me of a recent conversation in Brit Lit about the appeal of science for people like Huxley and Gosse. The immediacy of certain results can be tranformative. Better vision to bigger loads of smelted iron means impressive scales, greater human expansiveness, and mass social and cultural ill, as well as the opposite. The smaller scales that we can control gives the illusion of control on the opposite scale. As the body grows, it also reduces. The body in mathematical space.