HW6.3.2 Animation Artist Research: Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry is a French film director who has directed major motion pictures such as Be Kind Rewind and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  He has also animated music videos for many musicians including The White Stripes, Bjork, and The Chemical Brothers.  The music video that originally made me aware of his work, was the stop motion animation he created for The White Stripe's "Fell in Love With a Girl" in 2002.  The music video was created with thousands of shots of individually built Lego sets and figures.  This work especially highlights the arduous process involved in stop motion animation because in addition to taking each individual photograph of each frame within the video, each figure and scene had to be built and rebuilt, piece by piece for every frame.  The resulting animation is intricately done with fluid movement.  The nature of Legos however, makes the figures appear blocky and pixelated.  This retains the digital element of the work and differentiates it from other animation styles.

Sources:

http://www.michelgondry.com/?tag=the-white-stripes

HW6.3.1 Animation Artist Research: Lorna Mills

Lorna Mills is a curator and artist who creates Gifs.  She credits the rise of social media as one of the reasons for the popularity of Gifs and has used the communal nature of social media in her art practices.  She is one of the co-creators of the project, Sheros, which was one of the first programs to focus on Gifs in 2011.  Sheros was a series of monthly parties where artists would present Gifs created to honor specific female icons such as Dolly Parton and Yoko Ono.  The event grew in popularity and emphasized the possibilities of Gifs.  One of the benefits of creating Gifs for offline presentation, is that file sizes can be much larger and artists can have much more room for creativity and elaborateness.

Lorna Mills Gifs Exhibition

Sources:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/will-galleries-and-museums-ever-embrace-animated-gif-art-9650
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/LornaMillsImageDump/

Click here to see a book of my scans!

HW5.3 Blank Assignment

For this assignment, we were asked to return to any past assignment in this class and revise it.  Based on our new learned experiences and feedback from our classmates, we were to alter a past work to change it, hopefully for the better.  I decided to return to the digital collage that I made during the second week of this class.  It had been suggested that the work could be improved by filling in all of the blank spaces in the background with more images.  I did this and I think it has definitely made an impact on the work.  The piece is much busier and takes more time to understand.  Some of the figures are almost entirely covered by other images, but I tried to make sure that the kiss or embrace was highlighted where they were seen.  Overall, this was an interesting exercise and I enjoyed returning to a past work, but I am not sure that I like this new version any better than my original work.

HW5.2.2 Scanography Artist Research: Thomas McDonnell

Thomas McDonnell has been a photographer for 20 years and began using the scanner to capture images of flowers.  Later, he experimented with bringing his scanner into the real world.  Instead of bringing objects into the studio to use on the scanner, he brought the scanner outside with him.  Using a battery powered scanner, McDonnell was able to mount the scanner on his car as he drove past houses or place he scanner in front of moving objects, like cars or children.  He enjoys that his works appear to be scans of photographs, but are actually direct scans of real life.  While many artists that use scanners have some photography background, McDonnell treats his scanner exactly as he would his camera.  By taking the scanner into the real world, his works are more grounded in realism and less separated from their subjects.

Sources:
http://www.scannography.org/artists/McDonnell-ThomasW.html
http://www.scannography.org/artists/McDonnell-2.html

HW5.2.1 Scanography Artist Research: Rebecca Wild

Rebecca Wild is an artist that combines traditional art media and digital art media.  She uses her childhood passion for painting as inspiration for her work with scanners.  Wild paints directly onto the scanner bed while she uses heavy-duty tape to ensure that the paint does not leak into the scanner.  She is particularly interested in liquids; how liquids interact with each other and how liquids are an integral part of human existence.   Therefore, she often mixes paint with water or oils on the scanner bed in order to create a more fluid appearance.  Her work may look spontaneous, but she actually uses syringes to precisely apply the paint to the scanner bed.  She also adds a layer of glass to many of her works to seal the paint to the scanner bed and create air bubbles.  Additional layers of paint can be added on top of the glass panes to create depth.  Her work relies on the fluid, watery nature of the paint.  Without the immediate use of the scanner, the paint would eventually dry and the work would be changed forever.

Syringe Paint Application

Before Glass Plane

Glass Plane

After Glass Plane

Sources:
http://www.scannography.org/artists/Wild-Bex.html
http://www.scannography.org/tips/Bex-Wild-tips.html

HW5.1 Scan Series

I really enjoyed this assignment.  Playing with the scanner was so much fun and I found myself continuously pushing the scan button for much longer than I expected.  When I started this assignment, I was planning on laying out lots of different pieces of jewelry in an intricate pattern, but the static images turned out to be very boring.  I much preferred the scans where I moved the objects and created distortions.  I made one series using large fake pearls, fake velvet gloves, and a silk scarf.  The other series is made with tin foil and a box lid with a holographic design.

Ladies Who Lunch

Shiny Things

OA#9 Children and Photography

Three connections between photography and children:

1.  Children, like photography, will react to whatever you do, even things you didn't mean to do.  If you accidentally cuss in front of a child, they will probably repeat the word continuously and at the most inopportune moments.  If a leaf accidentally falls into frame while you are taking a photo, the camera will probably focus on it and blur whatever you were originally photographing.  Therefore, you must pay attention to how you interact with children and act appropriately.  You must also pay attention when taking a photograph to everything that may affect the photo and act accordingly.

2.  Children will believe whatever you tell them and you can convince them with small gestures.  Tell them a fairy takes their baby teeth away when they leave them under their pillows and all you have to do is leave a a coin in its place to convince them.  Although photography is a medium that is known for being able to accurately depict real life, small tricks can allow you to create visual lies.  By playing with perspective, photographs can be taken that make it look like figures are holding incredibly heavy things, but in reality they are just farther away and lined up perfectly.  

3.  Children are unique and they are not afraid to show their differences.  Each child has their own favorite color, favorite food, and favorite book.  Each child has their own dislikes and fears and dreams.  Likewise, photography can be used in numerous unique situations.  Unlike painting or sculpture, photography can be used in more unique locations and situations than almost any other art form.  Photos can be taken while walking on a tightrope, hang-gliding, and even in space.

Sources:

http://pelfind.net/photo/152804p2917965/selective-focus-photography

https://www.pinterest.com/tatersandtots/illusions-and-trick-photography/

http://flymorningside.kittyhawk.com/adventures/tandem-hang-gliding-lessons/

OA#8.2 Photographer Artist Research: Melissa Zexter

Melissa Zexter studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and continued with her graduate study at New York University.  She uses digital prints and gelatin silver prints when working with photography, but then after taking her photos, she enhances them with the use of embroidery.  She has no formal training in the textile arts, but uses needle and thread to augment photography and create new works.  She has said that adding embroidery to her photography makes her works more personal and allows her to react to the past that the photograph depicts.  I especially like her work because it takes a relatively easy to reproduce technique, photography, and adds an intricately unique element that distinguishes each copy of the work.

Sources:
http://www.textileartist.org/melissa-zexter-interview-embroidered-photography/
http://www.melissazexter.com/new-color

OA#8.1 Photographer Artist Research: Hannah Barco

Hannah Barco is a performance artist and for her MFA thesis at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago she performed a series of walks from her apartment to the gallery where her work was displayed.  Each day she wore the same outfit and walked the same route, but carried a different object with her.  Once she reached the gallery, she would add the random objet to a growing sculpture and she would write down reasons (real or imaginary) for bringing the object.  This alone is an interesting project, but her addition of a photographic element is my favorite part.  Each day, she had a friend hide somewhere along her route to the gallery and take a photo of her to document the trip.  Some of the photos are from obscure angles and Barco may have not even known she was being photographed, but the entire walk is part of a performance so she is always aware of being seen.  Each photo was added to the work in the gallery.  I saw this work at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum as a part of the Walking Sculpture show and I loved this series of photographs.  By wearing the same outfit everyday, she created a visual motif that ties the series of photographs together and makes the changing object in her hands stand out.

Sources:
http://www.wearestillmaking.com/hbarco/2013/11/30/things-to-come/

OA#6 Social Media Outreach

For this assignment, I shared my digital photography experiment on social media to get feedback.  I shared my photo on a private Facebook group and this is the result:

OA#7 Reading Response

After reading New Literacies and Social Practices of Digital Remixing by Lankshear&Knobel, I was interested in how broadly Lawrence Lessig defined the idea of remixing.  It is true that almost everything that we do in life is inspired by things that we have witnessed or experienced and our responses rely on the original product or action, but I had never thought of our responses as remixes.  In my mind, I made a distinction between reactions and remixes.  Reactions, in my opinion, are new material influenced by the original product or referencing the original product, but not containing any form of the original product.  To me, remixes are works that directly combine the original product and other material.  It is a very vague distinction, but I felt myself compelled to make it while reading the article.  

In college, I took an economics class on The Information Economy.  It focused on the pricing and markets surrounding experience goods like music and movies.  Some of the most interesting conversations we had were about the copyright laws of experience goods and how they help/hinder content creators.  This article reminded me of technology's role in the advent of extreme copyright laws.  The authors touched on the how access to digital editing programs allows remixes to be made "in bedrooms, family rooms, and basements around the world."  But access to the internet seems to be the biggest force behind copyright fever.  The internet allows creators to easily share their remixes with much larger audiences than ever before.  In a pre-internet world, remixers had to work much harder to spread their remixes and they usually had geographically limited audiences.  Even if they were making money from their remixes, their audiences were small enough that it did not impede on the original artist's revenue.  With the internet, remix audiences are much larger and the profit potential is much higher.  Therefore, artists want to protect their original content and any money earned from it.

OA#1 Comments and Reflection

The blogs I commented on were:

Ava
Gina
Anita
Carianna
Jihyun
Casey
Teny

While looking at everyone's blog posts about their digital collages, I saw the many, many ways that digital drawing can be used to create very different pieces.  Each of us used technology in different ways based on our understanding, level of comfort, and traditional training in other art forms.  Digital art tools are just as expressive as traditional media and have just as many avenues to explore.

OA#3 Digital Drawing in the Classroom

I think one of the most interesting features of using Photoshop as a digital drawing tool is the ability to create different layers in a work.  If I were to incorporate digital drawing into an art class, I would use the layers as a means to explore composition in painting.  

Class Instructions:

1. Spend one hour drawing using Photoshop.  Your drawing should include multiple objects or figures and have a distinct foreground and background.  Each object should be drawn on its own separate layer.
2. Save a copy of your original drawing.
3. Then change the order of the layers in the drawing so that certain objects come forward or backward in the piece.
4. Save a copy of the new drawing.
5. Change the order of the layers again to create another new piece.
6. Save the third version of the drawing.
7. Examine the three versions of your work.  How do the compositions differ and what affect does this have on your opinion of each of them.

OA#2 Rethinking the Digital Collage

While looking at other examples of digital collage on my classmates’ blogs, I realized how digital painting and drawing allows artists to push their works to the limit.  Programs like Photoshop are quicker than traditional painting and allow artists to take chances with their work because the undo button is always a click away.  If I were to redo the assignment, I would go farther and create a completely stuffed collage.  Although I like my original collage and it is more to my liking to have the kissing couples each have their own breathing room.  If I wanted to test the limits of the assignment, I would use many more art historical kisses and completely fill the canvas so that there were no visible background.  The result would be an orgy of figures tangled in each others arms and indistinguishable from each other.  I would make many of the couples very small in order to fill in the smaller gaps between the other figures and they would only be distinguishable when the image was magnified.  If I knew how to, I would love to animate certain figures so that a few limbs or heads would move and create even more excitement in the work.

OA#4: Explore Digital Photography I

While looking around my room, I saw the Batman mask that hangs on a nail above my bed and decided to photograph it.  I was particularly drawn to the shadow that it cast due to the lamp on my nightstand.  I liked that the shadow did not appear as a mirror image of the mask, but was distorted and stretched across the wall.  I also liked the simple color contrast of the black mask against the white wall.

HW3.4.2 Social Media Artist Research: Brian Piana

Brian Piana uses the hive mind mentality of social media to piece together a fully rendered portrait of society.  On his website, thecollectiveme.com (sadly no longer working), Piana created a program that pulls from Twitter's main feed any tweets that contain the word "me."  The tweets are varied from happy to sad to obscene.  Piana's goal was to connect the diverse viewpoints across Twitter into a unified field of self examination.  The result is a self obsessed stream of consciousness based on society's collective view of ourselves.  If the website had continued working, it could have acted as a barometer of society's self image and potentially been used to track rates of emotion in response to world events.

Sources:

http://www.brianpiana.com/category/onlineworks/

HW3.4.1 Social Media Artist Research: Man Bartlett

Man Bartlett is an artist who used the open platform of social media to produce a work that examines the boundaries between public and private affairs.  From 2011 to 2012, as a reaction to the Occupy Wall Street movement, he publicly tracked his finances on the Twitter account, @OccupyMan, and on a public Google Document.  He tweeted every financial transaction he made and included the amount of money he spent or received.  As we have become a more digital society, we have become more and more open to sharing our private lives with the public.  Most people would not think much of uploading a picture of their lunch or their vacation to Twitter, but money has always been a social taboo.  By publicly airing his financials, Bartlett takes the social aspect of our society to the extreme and critiques the financial secrecy of Wall Street.

Sources:

http://www.manbartlett.com/actions/

HW3.3.1 Digital Drawing Artist Research: Michael Manning

Michael Manning is a Los Angeles based artist whose work, 100 Paintings, exemplifies the limitless possibilities that digital painting offers.  He originally created 100 digital paintings, then with the help of coder, Zach Shipko, created the website 100paintings.gallery.  The website randomly creates a composition by layering five of the paintings on top of each other.  A new composition is created every time the page is refreshed.  There are 9 billion possible unique compositions made from layering all of the 100 paintings in different sets of five.  While it would have been the endeavor of a lifetime to paint 9 billion paintings using a traditional medium, with digital painting and coding, the work is made a reality.

Sources:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/sep/3/brushes/
http://www.100paintings.gallery/