Racialization in Digital Art

So on MLK day I was sitting in my usual coffee shop (#Roasters) where I had been working on homework (#buried) and I could see the computer screen that they were running pandora on. Pandora was displaying Big Boi's CPU album pictured below. I opened google and found the second picture as the artwork for MLK day. There is nothing I could find posted online about the artwork on the album cover but it seems odd how similar they are in color type, the direction the person is looking, and the facial features of the person.

openFrameworks

What is it? openFrameworks is an open source c++ toolkit.
Aren't there a lot of those? There are many different c++ toolkits, but few are tailored around digital art design and experimentation. And, even less bring together so many commonly used libraries for audio, video, font, image, and 3D model loading and processing.

I have never done computer programming stuff before so I'm not sure how well this is going to turn out, but, I am definitely going to play around with some projects in openFrameworks on my new laptop when I get it next week!


An openFramework's creation by Sandra Ciampone:

Saidi Ray

I was searching for computational art and found these things called node gardens. I was looking for glitch art and these aren't quite the same because they are drawn but they are still pretty awesome. I would love to find a program that can "grow" these node gardens at random.

Propaganda Poster (Project of Death)

I call this the project of death because it meant the death of my laptop Tuesday morning. I was able to install Ai on an archaic dell to recreate much of my poster but it was too slow to accomplish some of the tasks such as a complex clipping mask that I originally had used on my text as opposed to the transparency effect I ended up using. If anyone has any recommendations for new laptops please do not hesitate to share - with the exception of mac because I cannot currently afford one. More in the $300-600 dollar range right now.

Anyways, here is my propaganda poster.

Thanks!

Picture This

I was looking through some old textbooks and found one from a rhetorics course I took my first semester at WSU Tri-Cities. The book is Picture This by Molly Bang. The book basically tries to answer the question: How can shapes, color, and composition make us feel the way things look? It's a great (and easy) read and I remember it being super useful in learning to analyze visual texts because it gives some insight into how we interpret shapes and colors without even realizing it. An example would be the cover, pictured below, we sense danger because of the sharp white teeth of the animal with red eyes. But, we might overlook the sense of uncertainty created by the "trees" not all standing vertical, or the animal being so much bigger than the small animal that looks to almost be "hiding" behind a tree.