Project 01

Done! Looks like things took a different turn than what I expected.

These three images are my take on alteration. Three objects, each with part of their surface texture removed and replaced with something else, merging two images as one. The project began as an attempt to peek into the fourth dimension: the textures represent what the object once was before it became a leaf, a page in a book, et cetera. I took pictures of what I assumed plants, paper and DVDs were made of: dirt, wood, and something vaguely adamantine. Throughout the course of compositing these images, my research began to poke holes at my theory. In fact, plants made mostly out of the carbon in the air, not the dirt in the soil. DVDs are made from alloys of silver, indium, antimony, and tellurium. Paper, although technically made from wood, also contain additives, and are coated with a variety of materials for better printing. With this information in hand, the three images become naïve assumptions of what things used to be.

7th Annual Pasadena Art Walk

This past Saturday I went with my dad to the Art Walk in Pasadena, which was on a small stretch of El Molino Ave near Vroman's Bookstore. Mostly it was a bunch of artists selling their work, and honestly none of them really caught my attention. There was free museum admission, so we checked out the Pacific Asia Museum and looked at a bunch of Buddhist sculpture figures. At the time we went, they were rearranging the exhibits so half the galleries were empty. Late in the afternoon we went to the Paseo Colorado where there was a music event going on and saw a performance from the Taiko Center of Los Angeles. They were okay, but truthfully I felt every thing that day was geared mainly towards children and family activities, so I didn't really enjoy this visit.

Their drums weren't even that big.

Beginning Project 01

My Project 01 will (probably) be about Altering the Organic. I will attempt to do so by substituting one object's texture for another, and presenting it as reality. The first step of this is to take a bunch of photographs of potential textures to use...

The Shakespeare Redesign Project

The Shakespeare redesign project is a redesign of this flyer for The Shakespeare Papers.

My immediate approach was to do research on the subject, and I found that since the creation of this flyer their website had been extensively redesigned for a more modern look. Instead of copying that look (they had a newer logo design as well) I took elements (their updated information blurb as well as the longer subtitle) and put them on my own composition.

I knew there would be a lot of old wrinkled paper textures used elsewhere but I figured a simpler aesthetic would work just as well.

In class, points were made about the phone number throwing things off balance a little, the way the body text isn’t quite working either due to color. A suggestion was made to justify the paragraph both left and right, but I tried that before and it didn’t work out. Some wanted more divisions of information, others liked the drop shadow. The biggest criticism came from the lack of contrast in fonts.

Ken Feingold

This past Wednesday Sage did a presentation on the work of artist Ken Feingold, who was featured in our textbook. Feingold's If/Then piece, basically two robotic heads having a philosophical conversation about existence with each other, draws a lot of parallels with many popular science fiction tropes. Issac Asimov and Philip K. Dick explored the problems with consciousness in artificial intelligence... but really these talking heads reminded me of the video game Portal 2. Specifically with this turret. I'm not sure why, but after going through countless puzzles avoiding deadly yet loquacious automated turrets, and then encountering this "different" turret... I don't know. The idea of a truly artificial intelligence is bewildering to comprehend, right now we are still limited to faking it with prerecorded messages. What's the difference between a robot that is fully aware of itself and a robot that acts as if it's fully aware of itself, but isn't?


What's the difference between a human that is fully aware of themself and a human that acts like it is but really isn't?

  

Common Tread

Two weeks ago I went to see the Common Tread exhibition in the CSUF Begovich Gallery along with the Art History class I was in. The curators, Martha Rocha and Martin Lorigan, talked briefly about the exhibition and their road trip across America they took before starting this collection.

At the front of the gallery were walls stacked with framed photographs of what looked like vacation photographs. Pictures of people posing in front of monuments, pictures that wouldn't look out of place in a dusty old family album. There was a mockup of a billboard that served as the screen for a projection of a photo presentation of postcard designs made specifically for the event, they appear in the Common Tread title which itself is a postcard. In the middle there were a collection of artwork dealing with road trips and traveling, and at the back was a "garage", so the whole experience is like the road trip the exhibition is about. I especially liked one piece near the back of the gallery where you had to look through a thing in order to see the picture.