Monday, April 2, 2018

I want to study water pollution and littering around the nature trail and how it’s effecting the waters as well as its inhabitants. I may also investigate the Opal Shipwreck sight. I plan on collecting trash as well while I’m out and incorporating it into my final art piece.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Week 7 Reflection Post

Seeing uses for .html is interesting and I've never thought much on using it for art but am now aware of different ways I've seen it being done on the web. Some that come to mine are interactive websites for meditation and simulations of lower class living I had to look into for a sociology class. I think I'd like to use it in a similar manner to communicate an idea and give information through an interactive formatting.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Chimeras, Hybrids, and Monsters, Oh My!

Going into this project I tried to think of things that wouldn't ordinarily mix, such as man and animal, sea creatures and land creatures or in my case, tech and elements of nature. I was very interested in glitch art, and I have not explored much digital art before now so it seemed like a good place to start. The idea was to take elements of nature and mix with technology making them appear as if they were also glitching in and out of the composition. I focused on plants animals and people. The last composition involving people seemed to disrupt the final series because it was more difficult to think how to compose it and also gave the impression that I was making a statement on technology disconnecting humanity. The one involving animals however was fairly successful in my opinion because I used the tech aspect merely to set up the seen of a tiger using its striped to camouflage and stalk it's prey.

In making my compositions I also chose my subject because I knew finding appropriate material, such as computer glitches, would be easier than finding obscure pictures. Making the images involved quite a big of copying images on the composition and dragging them forward to make a repeated shape like nature itself was glitching. The most difficult aspect would probably be the tiger, getting each stripe and deleting to was difficult and involved quite a bit of close up selections. Also cropping out parts of the tigers in the background so they did not block that the black stripes had been replaced. Overall I'm mostly satisfied with how the composition came out and it was an interesting bit of experimentation.

Friday, February 9, 2018

.GIF Response

GIFs had a very humble beginning with text graphics for Site Under Construction and the small emote entitled Dancing Girl by Chuck Poynter. This small artform has since exploded all across mainstream media being used in average everyday conversation on Facebook, Tumblr, and in general text messaging. They've become a very intricate part of online interaction and communication. GIFs as an art form were revolutionary in their democratic nature because anyone with a computer could make them, download them, and warp them into something new. For Instance, Chuck Poynter was a retired man of arms in his 50’s and yet he managed to produce a collection of over 500 early GIFs in the span of one and a half years  due to how readily available the media was. GIFs changed the playing field opening new doors to new media art and design through computer technology. In the words of Sha “gifs are a dumb, limited file format, and in the end this is why they are important: they do not belong to anyone. because of their constraints they become a design material, to be played with, challenged, and explored. To try and domesticate them would be missing the point.” this the idea of why GIFs are so revolutionary in short, they are easily acquired, reused, and reformatted. They don't particularly produce revenue because of the open source quality about them and that's all the better. The ironic thing about this is that GIFs were not originally even meant for animation and just intended for small file use. Designers weren’t even very interested in gifs thinking it wasn't an effective method for digital art or file storing until people started incorporating animation into its uses. The GIF format had so much untapped potential in the beginning and now it’s difficult to find someone who doesn't know and love GIF formatting as a means of communication, art, and memeing.