Into Digital Arts

After reading excerpts from Invisible Cities by Calvino , I attempted to find an image representing the city of Valdrada. I was unable to find a quality image of the city. But for description, it is a small city in Indian located in the middle eastern part of the country. The particular expert that I am focusing on talks about how the city of Valadra is unlovingly mirrored in the river that flows past the city, just as the small town was overlooked by the world at large through its lack of representation online. In the excerpt, the reflection is described as a city that no one lives in, while everyone lives in that reflection through their actions. The reflection in the water is the result of the actions of the people in the city, and no one in the city acknowledges this. It just makes me wonder what else in our daily lives we walk past unnoticed. The intricate beauty of the world that effectively reflects our actions, gone unnoticed. Such as the footsteps left in the snow by children ...

As I continue my studies into forms of video art, I recently came across an article titled  Smashed cars and Chinese chewing: the five masterpieces of video art  and I found one of the pieces it discusses to be very interesting. The piece is called He Weeps for You  by Bill Viola. This piece has the viewer enter a circular room in which a video camera is trained on a copper pipe that leads from the ceiling and ends at exactly eye level. From the end of the pipe, a drop of water emerges. The camera, with its extreme close up perspective, sees a fish eye effect from the water droplet. Then, the droplet falls onto an amplified drum resulting in a startling boom, leading the cycle to repeat itself. This piece struck with me because of its repetitiveness. Viola's works often tend to focus on the human condition. This piece is almost screaming about how humans tend to follow the same path over and over, even though that, with the sound of the drum, they can realize it each t...

For this exercise, we were to pick an adjective that we feel best describes our artwork. In my case, I love telling stories and that is something that I always try and do with each of my works, even though I don't always succeed. But that is why I am taking these classes to try and better myself as an artist. Looking forward to seeing what works I create in the next couple of years, it will probably not resemble any of the stuff I am making now. 

Type choice has always been something that I have not really understood, or really taken the time to try and understand. Other than my professor warning specific students, me being one in particular, to only ever work with one type at a time, I know little to nothing about using type. However, after reading an article about choosing a typeface, it has made me realize how much work goes into choosing a typeface depending on the media that it will be representing. For example, I never realized that you need to pick a type that has high readability for those projects where a lot of text will have to be read. Since the white space between the letters, allows for faster reading. Whereas, a decorative font that has a lot of extra black space, makes reading lots of words, one after another, very difficult. Now I know why, I should only stay with one font type until I learn how to use font families effectively.

The first project for my graphic design 1 class was to construct an alphabet either out of objects that are in my daily life, or find them in the environment. I decided to construct my alphabet out of pool balls, as I have recently gotten back into playing the game. This assignment was a bit tricky as the shape of the balls and how close they are together made masking the individual objects difficult. One of the issues with the result is that some of the letters are a different size than the rest, such as the 'w'. This is because I was not careful when taking the images and the longer letter made cropping it to the correct dimensions as the other images, quite difficult.

I have finished my first project for my video art class. This project was a challenge for me as I did not initially approach the project from the right direction. When viewing some of the experimental videos that I had shot, I found a video that was a really close up shot of me eating, this struck a cord. So I decided to take this idea and base the rest of my video around it. So I invited a number of my friends to dinner, and I recorded them. The result, was the video below. I hope you enjoy.

This is a rough storyboard for my first project for the video art class. I am not quite sure how I feel about this project yet, but I wont know until I put stuff in front of the camera.

This is a preview of my work for the first assignment, it is not yet complete.

To begin working on the first project, we first discussed different shot types and how we might incorporate them. This is a little sandbox experiment practicing with different shot types.

The first work that I found quite interesting is a piece called Gillian Wearing / 2 into 1 . This work uses a technique that is very common in modern cinema, called a voice over. This is where a voice actor talks over the video of another character or actor, in a way that makes it seem that a different voice is coming from the character shown on screen. In the terms of Gillian Wearing, there are two children and a mother having a conversation about one another, however the children's voices come from the mother's mouth and the mother's voice comes from the children. I find this piece so interesting because this was one of the first examples of the voice over.

The first piece is a work by Ed Rusha in 2015, called Sponge Puddle.  I find this piece really interesting as I can not quite understand what Ed was intending for the meaning to be for the viewer. I also really enjoy the color scheme and how the colors of the background seem to reflect off the top of the snow covered mountains.  The next piece is a work by Jenny Holzer who works in many mediums, ranging from LED signs to painting. She primary focuses on public works of art with the use of projections and LED signs. This saying "Protect me from what I want" is a saying that she put on a sign above Times Square in New York City. This saying is very profound to me in that it has strong meaning to me in that it pertains to what humans tend to do. Humans do not always long for things that are healthy or beneficial to themselves, such as alcohol and drugs. This saying, is referencing this fact and it is something most people come into contact in their daily lives....