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Void is a small, barely lit club on Mercer Street in Manhattan's Soho district. A videoscreen fills the southern wall; depending on the night, it runs anything from Rebel Without a Cause to the looping, psychedelic videos most often screened at raves. On this particular Wednesday night, an impressive number of luminaries from the net's close-knit design community are here--there's James Baker, founder of the wddg (the nyc design firm that gave the web Sadistic Boxing and other quality timewasters), over by the bar; James Paterson (presstube.com) and Manuel Tan (uncontrol.com), perched on stools near the door; and Branden Hall (figleaf.com), lodged between a pile of coats and a stack of computer bags, who's arrived straight from LaGuardia, having hopped a plane from Washington, D.C., to be here.

They've gathered for another installment of Flash Riots, an informal, occasional meeting of developers. The upper crust of the web's design community functions like famous novelists, minus the acrimony -- they constantly seek out, critique and reference one another's work, sharing ideas in hopes of pushing the net in new directions. Flash Riots gives them an excuse to meet in the real world. Attendance tonight is at a record high, due in large part to the first-time appearance of Joshua Davis.

Only a few days removed from a trip to Japan, Davis is an accomplished traveller. When not working on one of his five websites, dreaming up ideas as senior design technologist at Kioken--the Manhattan web design company that made waves on cnn last spring for "firing" Sony as a client--feeding a rampant videogame addiction or spending a rare free moment with his wife, Davis is the star attraction at web conferences around the world. He extolls the virtues of Flash, the web's design program of choice, and the things that inspire him--like children's books and putting red food colouring in his eyes.

He has been on something of a world tour for the past year, with stops in London, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Paris. He is treated like a pop star, receiving awards at almost every stop, along with photo and autograph requests. After a Q & A session at a conference in New York last summer, one young designer approached Davis, held out a skateboard with both arms, and mumbled "Um, would you mind signing this?" "Oh, awesome!" Davis said, his hands chopping through the air the way they do every time he talks. "I rode their decks when I was a kid."

At Void, Davis is the center of attention. When he describes Akihabara, a section of Tokyo where boxes of electronics and computer parts spill onto the sidewalks, old pals like Paterson and Baker smile in from the perimeter. When he complains that his tattoos--he has sleeves of ink running down both arms and an elaborate coi motif covering his back--prevented him from bathing in the hot springs near his hotel, new friends try to ingratiate themselves by pulling at shirtsleeves or pantlegs to reveal their own work. The tattoo worship peaks around midnight, when Davis pulls up his shirt so a fan with a digital camera on his wristwatch can snap photos of Davis's back.

"Josh's stuff was amazing when we met three years ago…and then he turned into a superstar celebrity a year ago," Baker says. "He's one of the most talented people out there, and obviously one of the biggest personalities. That personality of his has been the secret to his success." Davis is used to the attention, and jokes about it with a reference to Fight Club, one of his favourite movies (The Matrix is the other one): "I'm Tyler Durden, man. Any minute now a dozen guys are going to come through that door and beat the crap out of all of you."

With Praystation.com and Once-Upon-A-Forest.com -- the former is a laboratory; the latter is a playground--Davis has ensconced his position as the web's foremost design talent. On top of that, he manages Dreamless.org, a community site for designers; Cyphen.com, a colour-matching tool; and, coming this spring, Antiweb-Chaos.com, a project intended to help online designers publish hard copies of their work. And then there's Kioken, a teaching position at New York's School of Visual Arts and the rigours of being the Flash community's unofficial spokesman.

Davis receives hundreds of emails a day from fans and friends, mostly of the "How'd you do that?" variety. He is obsessed with chaos theory and the laws of nature, and wants to make surfing the web a more organic experience. Davis posts his experiments--last year he figured out how to impose friction and elasticity on websites--on Praystation, allowing his acolytes to download and scrutinize his code. He wants them to deconstruct his work and apply what they learn to their own projects. "Josh has shown me things that I never knew possible," says Tan, whose Uncontrol.com, with its clean interface, small live area and mind-bending Flash experiments, is similar to Praystation. As much as one individual can, Davis is shaping the look of a medium. Simply put, he wants to change the way you experience the web.

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As the festivities wind down at Void, Riots organizer Peter Harris checks over both shoulders to make sure no one's listening, then whispers, "The secret that I haven't told anyone is that I'm throwing this so I can meet Josh." Harris used to host the event at a DJ hangout in Brooklyn, but Davis wouldn't come because of the distance. Hence Void. "Tonight," Harris says, "is my dream come true."

Seventeen hours after Void: Davis is running behind schedule, and is nearly late for the basic Flash course he's teaching at the School of Visual Arts. He left Flash Riots with Figleaf's Hall last night, unwittingly sharing a cab with a headhunter who realized who Davis was and tried to hire him. (He was instantly--and loudly--rebuked.) Davis and Hall then took an hour-long train to Davis's place in Long Island, swapping ideas until the sun came up.

At sva, Davis stops to say hello to a security guard, then climbs the stairs to his classroom. It's slender and high-ceilinged, with about two dozen G3 workstations lining its walls. Davis drops his bag on a chair, strolls to the front of the class and shouts, "Ladies, gentlemen, robots, welcome to the next four hours of Flash 5 hell!" There are seventeen students in the room, and most of them seem to adore Davis; when they ask questions--or just whine "Jawwwwsh, it doesn't work" in response to his instructions--it sounds like someone asking their older brother for a ride to the mall.

Last summer, Davis sent the school's administrators an email wondering if they would let him teach an advanced Flash course. They were thrilled with the offer, but didn't have anything more than a basic course to give him. So Davis landed here, running a class that he could teach on autopilot. He is a patient instructor, reviewing new concepts with the qualifier, "just for the purpose of us not being confused," but he can't sit still. He's constantly popping in and out of his chair, and paces when he stands. "Did I spell that right?" he asks as he scribbles on a whiteboard. "S-q-u-a-r-e…. You ever go home and spell pork and say that's just not right? You can spell androgynous just fine, but pork looks wrong." He's smiling now. "When you're a genius like me, this kind of stuff happens all the time."

Davis likes giving examples for everything, and answers a question about navigation by pointing his web browser to motown.com, a supremely sophisticated site with a side-scrolling interface. The class oohs and aahs, but Davis never mentions the fact he helped build it.

"Teaching allows me to give back what was so freely given to me," he says after class. "At one time, I was a student and somebody else was a teacher. It's a humbling and amazing experience to have that reversed. It refines your craft because it takes you back to the basics--you can see students hitting the same roadblocks that you did. Revisiting those blocks centers you."

In his own words, Davis is "male, 29 years old, 5' 9", 170 lbs., arms sleeved with tats and full back tattoo, minor facial hair under chin, short hair, Tiffany & Co. wristwatch, 99 percent of the time wearing something from Banana Republic--because I'm a good consumer--and looking normal, all the while being insane…Hyper as hell, and annoying as shit if you hang out with me for too long, I imagine. Don't sleep, don't drink, don't do drugs--the only liquid I consume is water. I swear to god, I can taste all of the carcinogens in soda. Although I do eat meat--there's nothing quite like it."

Davis's parents, Mary and Harold Schmidt, were high school sweethearts in Orange County, California. Their marriage lasted two years, ending shortly after Josh's first birthday. After the divorce, Mary met David Davis, an engineer working on the space shuttle for a nasa subsidiary. When Josh was six, David was transferred to Colorado. Mary came along with Josh, and married David soon after the family arrived in Littleton. Two years after the wedding, Josh gained a father in David, who legally adopted him, and a brother, James (he studies film and creative writing in L.A.). Josh lost something, too: Harold Schmidt died in a plane crash in 1981. "I was confused," Josh says, "having a biological father who didn't want to be in my life. His death left so much unfinished business." Around the same time, Josh was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and put on medication.

"They said here's some ritalin--it should fix you," he says. "Ritalin is actually speed, from what I understand, but in hyperactive children…I don't know the scientific thing, but they're missing something. When they're prescribed ritalin, it actually balances them out. You really have to watch though, because it could have the reverse effect--like it did with me. I had to be taken off of it after about two years. My heart was racing and I'd start to freak out. I've been off it since. You just learn how to live with add. It's not like something you can fix."

(Davis now finds the disorder more amusing than anything: He says his wife, Melissa Davis, an art director at Bookspan--formerly Doubleday Books--takes forever to say anything, and when she tells a story it usually ends with him gnashing his teeth and pleading for the point.)

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From an early age, Davis spent much of his time painting. In high school, he entered a portrait of a friend in a statewide painting contest in Colorado and took second place. He was also a sponsored amateur skateboarder for a couple years. His greater ambition, however, was to become a children's book writer-illustrator. "As a kid--and even now--I responded well to children's books," he says. "It's the toughest medium there is, because you have to convey something in a very complete form without using any heavy words. The theme must be there, and it has to come quickly, because before you know it the book is over. You can't get wordy or too conceptual."

In 1994, Davis enrolled in Brooklyn's Pratt Institute with a major in communication design and illustration and an art history minor. While still a student, he created a pair of book prototypes and sent them out to the only two publishers that he felt could do his work justice. He received form-letter rejections.

"They were printed on five-by-seven cards. I don't think they even wrote my name on them," he recalls. "Some of my professors said it's almost impossible to get anything looked at if you don't have an agent. I was discouraged, but they told me everything would be OK. There was this thing called the internet now, they said, and you could self-publish with it."

So Davis took to the web, and began teaching himself html and Javascript. He was working now, too, doing design consulting on Wall Street in a building next door to the American Stock Exchange--and near a woman named Melissa Lockhart. Josh and Melissa often passed each other on the street outside their offices, but neither of them took notice. Then Josh quit and went to Long Island to build web portals for Doubleday. By coincidence, Melissa came to the company a month later.

"There was this deserted area of the office where I used the fax machine," Josh recalls. "After I was done, I would go to an empty office to call and make sure that the faxes were received. I would sing old jazz tunes at the top of my lungs and talk to myself."

One day Josh sang his way toward the office and discovered that it wasn't empty anymore. There was a woman working inside; her name, of course, was Melissa. "Later she told me that my voice seemed familiar to her," Josh says. "She felt like it was a voice that she had been waiting for. But now she was so scared that she couldn't look up from the keyboard. I was wearing shorts, flip flops with my toenails painted and tattoos. That was all she could see [initially]. Then she looked up and our eyes met. She says it was like waves crashing into each other. For the first month, we were just friends. That matured to boyfriend and girlfriend, then we moved in together, then we got engaged and now we're married. It's been three years. Fate--it does exist."

Sometime after the engagement, David and Mary Davis decided to take Josh and James on one last family vacation--a cruise. "So Joshua takes off his shirt and gets in the hot tub," Mary says. "I don't know if you've ever been on a cruise, but most of those people are older. There were a lot of senior women around the hot tub, and there is Joshua--and all his tattoos. They stared at him for a few minutes, and then finally one woman said, ‘Um, are you a rock star?' He said no. Another asked, ‘Did you just get out of prison?' And Josh goes, ‘Oh yeah, just got out of prison, and now I'm on a cruise ship.'
"This happened at the beginning of the week. By the end, Joshua would walk through that cruiseship and every senior woman on that ship knew who he was and talked to him. He'd finally told them that he was a web designer. Two nights before we got off the ship, he entertained a whole group of people by singing ‘Love Me Tender.'"

Josh and Melissa live in a townhouse in Port Washington, Long Island. They often eat dinner at a clam-chowder house that hangs over the ocean on piers, and is no more than 300 metres from their front door. Their home is bright and Ikea-catalogue perfect, just like Edward Norton's apartment in Fight Club. Josh's high technology is everywhere, from the Sony home theatre system in the living room to the bigscreen TV, stack of gaming consoles and tricked-out PC in the basement office that he shares with his two cats. There's an arcade version of Centipede down there, too; Josh got it for Melissa a couple birthdays ago.

"I registered Praystation because I thought I would do a parody, a joke on PlayStation," Davis says. He's sitting on his living room couch, running his fingers over the stack of children's books he just retrieved from the basement. "I thought it would be sort of witty."

Praystation went live in 1997, but after less than a year Davis decided the gaming concept wasn't working. He decided to turn Praystation into an online confessional where visitors gave their sins and he emailed them a penance. In October 1998, he built an email voodoo doll ("You could spin it around 360 degrees, you could stick pins in it") with a pair of friends, and Praystation won Macromedia's Site of the Day award. His traffic spiked dramatically, from about a hundred hits a day to 27,000. Praystation, and Davis, were now on the map.

But Praystation wasn't enough. Davis had been trying for some time to translate his pen-and-paper illustration skills to digital art, and wasn't having much success. He decided he needed a proving ground where he could scan and animate his illustrations, so along came Once Upon A Forest. (The url is a reference to "Once upon a forest and many blades of grass ago," the first sentence in Stardust and Twilight Ashes, the children's book Davis couldn't get published when he was at Pratt Institute.) Here, he began posting indecipherable pieces that all have a tenuous link to nature. One month he put up an illustration of flower petals and a sliding bar that responds to variable friction; the next he did a timeline marking the Mayan predicted date of the apocalypse. (It's in 2012.) The images are accompanied by otherworldly sound collages assembled either by Davis or a DJ friend.

Davis took inspiration for Once Upon A Forest from Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The book, which features fourteen black-and-white drawings with one-sentence captions, tells the story of an aspiring artist, Harris Burdick,

who leaves his work with an illustrator named Peter Wenders. Burdick tells Wenders that the captions are just titles, and that each drawing has a complete story that he will return with the following day. But Burdick disappears, so Wenders goes to Van Allsburg, who appears as himself in the story, and the two men decide to publish the drawings as is. "As an adult you realize that there is no Harris Burdick and there may well be no Peter Wenders either," Davis says. "Van Allsburg presents a situation in which imagination reigns supreme, and you are left to decide what the stories might have been." As he flips through the book's pages, Davis says he was won over by the allure of creating an alter ego like Burdick and speaking through it. And so Once Upon A Forest became the private realm of Maruto, a "celestial architect" and distant, silent observer of our world.

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"I was going to give you this thing," he says, "but there'd be no help, no instructions, no faq. There's an email function, but you'll never get an email back from Maruto. Once Upon A Forest is a digital blackhole. I wanted this thing that you could play with, that had movement and sound, but it would be up to you to decide what you think it is, or what you need it to be. There have been a lot of times when Josh wanted to respond to emails, but the Maruto in the back of me says, ‘No! That's not how we do business.'

"I decided that the site wouldn't contain any type," he continues. "Because of that, I get emails in Russian, Spanish, French, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese. But I've never defined where Maruto is. Maruto is somewhere else, and unfortunately I don't even know where that is. I don't know anything about him or where he's at or how he's going to communicate. I don't know what he's going to do next.

"So many people who work for studios get these clients saying you have two seconds to capture people's attention, so make something so easy and so basic that we get them before they're gone," Davis says. "Once Upon A Forest is the nemesis of what people think the web should be. And the average user stays thirty minutes, then emails wanting to know if they've missed anything."

As Once Upon A Forest flourished, Praystation withered. Davis didn't have a vision for the site anymore, so he ripped down all the content and initially put up a redirect to Once Upon A Forest. Then he changed his mind. "I thought they should become opposites. Once Upon A Forest would be pretty and high-colour, with eerie sounds. It would be vibrant and organic. Praystation would be technical. It would be metals and robots and circuits."

Davis rebuilt Praystation in its current incarnation, a testbed for the Flash experiments that eventually become the foundation for a Once Upon A Forest piece, a Kioken project or nothing at all. It's almost entirely grey, and the type is exclusively Arial.

Davis likes to say that Praystation is the design site with no design, but that does his work a disservice. Maruto's Forest might be the place where Davis spreads his wings, but he learns to fly on Praystation. The site's calendar navigation system is an open diary charting the evolution of his ideas, such as a five-day experiment with inertia that begins with a sliding scrollbar that slows according to friction and ends with a free-floating box that can be dragged and thrown anywhere on the screen's live area. It might not sound like much, except that the series became an essential building block for motown.com, a high-profile job that Davis's Kioken spent months on last summer.

Praystation, however, is more than just a research lab. Last year, Davis found that the more work he did on the site, the more emails he got from other developers wondering how he'd done it. Websites created in html are easy to deconstruct; any browser will give you one-click access to their source codes. But with Flash sites, there's nothing to see: The source code will only tell you the name of each Flash movie imported onto the page. Davis, accustomed to sharing ideas from his programming days, decided to post his Flash files on Praystation, inviting anyone who was interested to download and scrutinize them.

"Praystation took off because Josh was doing stuff that was unheard of at the time," says Presstube's James Paterson. "You'd go to show someone the thing that blew you away yesterday, and there'd be something new to blow you away all over again. Josh sustained this amazingly long run of experimentation, and all the stuff he was doing seemed to be things that other people wanted to do but couldn't. And then he offered open source, just at the perfect time.

"Josh Davis gets more props than anyone," Paterson adds. "He's the reason why a lot of people got into Flash. And for people who were already into it, he introduced a technical side that they wouldn't necessarily have tackled. I think he's boss."

Davis moved quickly to capitalize on his rising stock in the Flash community, launching a community board on Dreamless so anyone interested in web design could come to share their ideas and find inspiration. The site took off, but crisis came in February when the board grew complacent and several members staged the online equivalent of a riot.

"Dreamless got so big that it started to fall apart," Davis says. "A person would register ten user names and pose a question, and then answer his own question under a different user name. Things like ‘What do you think of my site?' and ‘Yeah! I really loved it.' There was an uprising by a bunch of members--I think there were about sixteen of them--who had been there from the very beginning. They just destroyed the board with repeat postings.

"I understood what they were trying to do," he continues, "so I said I was going to burn the village. I tore down all the content and deleted all the user names. Boom! I wiped the slate clean. Then I set up the board so that only one person could register one name with one unique email address. When the new thing kicked live, I emailed the people who had posted the most and gave them a new url.

"A discussion started that I should leave the front page dead. We would let people talk about Dreamless.org, but when they got there, there would be no way to get in." There is now a hidden entry, but unless you know what to look for, Dreamless is--and will remain--nothing but a title and a flickering grey screen. "This way the community stays small," Davis says. "The level of discussion is really great now. All the people on there take it seriously."

With Dreamless back under control, Davis turned to work on the biggest gift he's ever given: his Praystation hard drive. He's having a CD made that will contain about 3,800 files. It will hold all the text, Illustrator and Photoshop files he collected in 2000, along with a score of experiments that never made it onto the web. He's going to launch Antiweb-Chaos.com when the CD is finished, and will market the disk as the site's first project.

While doing all of this, he will also sit in taxis going to and from airports in Texas, South Dakota and probably a few places he doesn't even know about yet. Every conference wants him, and he says yes whenever he can. "I'm more productive now," says Davis, who is often joined by Melissa. "I answer all my email on my laptop on the airplane. I do more reading on the airplane. Right now I'm reading Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines"--It's about the dangers of computers becoming smarter than humans--"As soon as I land, I've answered all my email and I'm pumped with ideas from reading. When I'm on the ground, I have more time to actually spend making things.

"The cool thing about travelling is that you're dropped into someone else's culture and someone else's environment. You spend a week in Hong Kong, then a week in Japan, then a week in Paris, and then a week in London and a week in Texas--you're so bombarded with ideas that, if anything, I'm ten times more creative and ten times more productive than I was just sitting in New York."

Kioken's office, located five blocks north of Wall Street, looks like the sort of place where you might purchase home insurance. The ceiling is made of cheap suspended tiling; the walls are painted a pale shade of what could be beige or grey, although there isn't enough sunlight to be entirely sure. Random notes and scribbles are tacked to the walls. That said, there are a few key comforts: Almost every desk has an Aeron chair--the Mercedes of office seating--and a big, black sgi computer.

Company co-founder Gene Na treated last year's Sony incident with blithe indifference--"They weren't listening to us," he told The Industry Standard, "so we had to let them go"--and his company hasn't suffered from the exposure. Sony came crawling back, as did Puffy Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment after it was nearly kicked to the curb. And then there's the matter of Motown, Barney's New York, Canon usa, Russell Simmons' 360hiphop.com, et cetera.

Davis came to Kioken after Doubleday and another consulting stint. In a story that ran in the wake of the Sony firing, cnn reported that an unnamed company had tried to lure him away from Kioken with an offer of a half million dollars for three weeks work. "It was actually $200,000 [U.S.] for two to three months work," he says. "That stuff happens all the time. One company in Los Angeles said they would pay me $100,000 [U.S.] just to walk through their door. I told them that they couldn't pay me a million dollars to move to Los Angeles. I tell everyone that I don't do freelance. If they want to work with me, they have to go through Kioken." (Davis won't talk about how much Kioken pays him.)

After work, Davis leads the way to what appears to be a converted storage closet in the office. Inside, Kioken founders Na and Peter Kang are sitting in front of a ridiculously large television. They're playing the original Streetfighter, which is too perfect, given that Kioken was named after the shout that Chung Li, one of the game's fighters, makes as she fires a ball of energy from her hands. Gaming keeps everyone in the office close; Davis says most of the firm's nineteen employees play between one and three hours a day. He stays long enough for a brief discussion of fighting strategy, then exits for the subway.

At Penn Station, waiting for his connecting train home, Davis mentions an email he received earlier in the day. It came from a woman in Arizona named Trishna, whose boyfriend, Joaquin, is a huge fan of Davis's. Joaquin's birthday was coming soon, Trishna wrote, and she wondered if Davis might meet him for lunch if she bought him a plane ticket to New York. "That's just weird, man," Davis says.

A month later, Joaquin arrives in New York, days later than originally planned. He misses seeing Davis, who has jumped a plane for a scheduled appearance in Hong Kong. In lieu of the meeting, Davis gives Joaquin the best present he can, posting a personalized Flash birthday card on Praystation.

Matthew McKinnon is the senior writer for Shift magazine.