The first substantial collaboration between Wits Digital Arts and the Wits School of Electrical and Information Engineering was displayed at the Engineering School’s annual Industrial Open Day on Tuesday 11 October. Entitled PowerFlash, the project was proposed by Digital Arts researcher and part-time lecturer, Andre Venter; and developed as a 4th year Information Engineering Project by Jacek Lyzwa and Shashank Venkatesh working under the supervision of lecturer, Steve Levitt.

PowerFlash is a visual tool which allows users to “configure the interactions between objects and active controls.” Engineering student, Jacek Lyzwa, demonstrating PowerFlash with a colour responsive automated drawing programme designed by Dgital Arts student, Mitch Said.

Digital Arts student, Mitch Said, testing his automated drawing programme working in PowerFlash, watched by lecturer, Andre Venter and Jacek Lyzwa.

Andre Venter explains: “PowerFlash was envisaged as a browser replacement – a new environment - in which Flash and other ActiveX controls – like serial communication or control system integration or other network controls like TCP/IP, GSM or BlueTooth - can freely exchange data with the processing priority afforded to Flash (or other audio visual technologies like Director) for high performance delivery of visual and audio content.
It is a ‘user friendly’ non-programming environment in which Flash and other controls can be linked to each other. A path of data exchange functions unidirectionally in PowerFlash transferring variables from one control to another. If you have seen Max/MSP and Jitter – imagine a “lite” version – but an open source one that uses Flash or Director as a full screen front end.
The application was developed as part of an open source initiative which we hope will grow amongst local developers in the field of digital media. Collabouration is the only viable model open to achieve a re-invention of our own digial ‘reality’ which we hope can be more open to change than the rigid and normalised technologies provided by commercial developers.
We plan many software and hardware add-on’s to expand PowerFlash’s reach beyond art galleries to industrial automation, public information, real-time animation and gaming.”