Awesome Digital Art Display Concept - Potential use of Flash Cube building in Kennewick?

I think this is absolutely awesome! What a cool way to use a building!

http://cargocollective.com/aaronmelander#Target-Lights

I wonder if this could potentially be done on the Flash Cube building someday...? It would be an awesome way to spark excitement about a local art community!

Blogworthy

Just got the email pictured below the other day; just another reason to consider Adobe Creative Cloud as an alternative to purchasing the program itself. Several of the media artists I have blogged about have Behance accounts and I am really excited that I can create my own. Better get busy creating content to fill it!

Searching for Media

I have found that the act of searching for new digital artists and their media is almost as exciting as finding new artists and their media. I wanted to find someone who was taking scientific images and using them for digital art so I started searching using terms like nuclear imaging and electron imaging and found the first picture below. It's a scanning transmission x-ray microscopy which they define as secondary electron imaging a topographical feature which can magnify up to 100,000 times. Not knowing what any of that means besides topographical and magnification I decided to search the image by uploading it to google. The other two pictures below are examples of what I found. The first one could have been a great discovery if I could read Chinese, the second one had some great reasons not to let people wear shoes from the street in a gym, and then I found the final image. The artists name is Desiree Kantrim and she is amazing. She works out of Jacksonville, Florida, was born in W. Europe, and has a BFA, and dual Master's in Linguistics and German Lit.

New idea for once I master OpenFrameworks: Have a collection called "Google" in which I take an image, search for related images, then compile a plethora of those related images using OpenFrameworks into a new image or series of images. (Nobody even think about stealing this idea). Just kidding :) let me know if you get any cool results!

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.

Triptych

For my typography assignment I created the above piece. I hopefully will be able to develop an entire series surrounding this type of design. The word is confidential however the original font is Jellyka Western Princess which has been a favorite of mine for some time. The above triptych  was designed to split in the middle of the second and third objects.

 

Yasuaki Onishi

Loved the presentation on Jerry Uelsmann! One of his pieces (which unfortunately I can't find now) reminded me a lot of Yasuaki Onishi's work, he's an installation artist who explores negative space and gravity in his series: Reverse of Volume.

The above is one of his pieces from this series that was on display at the Rice Art Gallery in Houston.

Don Relyea

I was looking for glitch art and came across Don Relyea. He is an Awesome artist! As an artist he taglines: "I write software to make art." According to his blog he uses C++ and Open GL to "write" his art, a technique he learned originally while working with game development. He also does a lot with slitscan photography. A process in which the a video is analyzed in frames with a small portion of each frame taken and montaged with the other segments to create an entirely new image than any of the frames of the video. Below are examples of both Don Relyea's glitch art and slitscan photography.

Rantings on Glitch Art (Forshadowing of What is to Come)

I struggled with glitch art a lot because it often seems to be art without explanation and without intent. It sometimes bothers me when art is just for hanging on a wall without either a concept or an explanation of what the artist saw. Some artist, me included, struggle to take concepts and turn them into visuals, but other artists have amazing visuals with no communicated intent or observations. Art is such an amazing tool for communication and drawing attention so I want to understand what my attention is being drawn towards and then compare that to my own thoughts and perceptions.

The top piece is a anonymous "glitch" of the bottom. I don't like the original at all but I really like the recreation because it gives off a feeling of submersion. It almost seems like, more than anything related to nuclear explosions, an exploration of being submerged or forced under by a force of unmatchable and near-surreal strength. A sense of loss of control. To me this is created by the bars that seem to recede from front to back instead of changing vertically.  I'm glad the original artist decided on creating it with a more oblique 3d-ish perspective from the contour of the city rapping around the explosion than designing it with a normal side or aerial view.

Digital Nature Montage

One of my friends had this set as his background on his Macbook. I thought it was pretty cool since we just worked on montages that showed the passage of time. I really liked the way it was split into panels, I would love to do a piece similar to this of my own someday. I am however curious as to how much time passed in between these photos, is it a lot or are they just not in chronological order?

The vertical frames also reminded me of a piece by Joshua Patnaude pictured below. Notice how, even though they both deal with the passage of time, they are both organized by color change inflicted by changing light not exclusively by time. This really appeals to me because it's very natural and there is a lot of color coherency.

Are We Humans, or are We Dancer?

I don't understand why I love art revolving around dancers so much, but I do. My very first design, which was done just over a year ago now as part of an interview process, incorporated a significantly modified version of the picture below. I was hooked.

 

 

 

I have fallen in love with artwork related to dancers. So when, in Mary Stewart's Launching the Imagination, the author begins discussing shapes - instantly I thought of an art exhibit opening my friend and I went to in Seattle. I wish I could remember the name of the photographer because his work was great but unfortunately I only remember the work. In the series he was working on he used different dancers and had them posing one at a time in different natural settings from around the world. By utilizing different natural features in their poses, as the motion in the pictures (created by their various stances) got more and more intense the dancers became less and less distinguished from their environments and more and more connected with the natural features in their surroundings (which also seemed to bring some of the features themselves into motion). The picture may be considered representational but the poses the dancers held were abstract, even to the point of seeming "pure form".

The painting below (an actual abstract by Pat Carroll) captures a similar quality and also incorporates some awesome texture.

Fascinated by Lines

So lately I have been fascinated by different artists use of lines. Mary Stewart, Director of Art Foundations at Florida State University, discusses in her book Launching the Imagination, the use of lines in cross-hatching and cross-contours to create intricate pseudo three-dimensional images. Albert Seveso uses both these techniques phenomenally in his work "David Lynch + Ice Cube".

The continuous curves on the left and right really draw your attention and give contrast to the face and background making the red and browns pop. Compared to Michelangelo's Head of Satyr in Launching the Imagination, the picture above demonstrates how a technique used 400 years ago can be translated into use in a modern medium to create something awesome. Michelangelo my have used cross-contours for hair but in my opinion Seveso takes it to a whole new level in the photo above in using it to create the eye-cuff and various other facial features.

In my personal work as a marketing consultant I have been experimenting with some other uses of lines. I recently finished designing the below business card w/ a client who already had a concept in mind.

He wanted his name and the text "owner" where it is located, his wife had a great idea of adding the line to the left of the text. While a horizontal line, like those placed below and above the letterhead, would have added the most stability. I think a vertical line was better than floating text not tethered to any stable object (Adam is also a very qualified accountant if you are looking for someone to do your taxes. My return this year should be more than I ever thought possible, just an fyi :) .

A Self-Portrait

I had a lot of fun creating the above self-portrait, a slightly cathartic experience that I wish I had more skill and passion to polish. I wanted to explore identity but I had trouble translating what I conceptualize for installation pieces into a 2-d image. I think I was able to express that sports and an active lifestyle are the only things that keep me from depression - I would have liked to incorporate a picture of one of my close friends that I often play sports with though because he is also a source of insecurity which makes sports interesting, unfortunately we have mutual friends in the class. My insecurities are fueled by a damaged relationship with my father and cause me to look for someone to fill those roles, in this case the person I also happen to spend the most time with who is incapable of meeting those needs. I know there is only one person capable of meeting those needs and I draw all sense of confidence from Him and the time I spend with Him. I used cardboard for background because my life is very compartmentalized and I wanted to express that I spend different parts of my life in different zones that I seldom let mesh.

The Mirror

By Cody Gregg

I can see the hurt beneath his eyes,

the deep somber litany of entrapment, depression, isolation, and disappointment,

running away from a past he isn’t sure how much longer he can hide, and desires he can’t fulfill.

The loneliness deviating his acceptance, and relationships

that should be great investments end,

in dysfunction as he pulls the plug on what sometimes feels

so right but sends him into dejection as he falls short of his expectation

of boundaries that he built in discipline, to easily leaped by momentum from a past…

I look away from his eyes,

the sadness, overwhelming, too much to bear.

Eyes I had beheld in hopes of finding life,

But only finding pain revealed in this mirror.

Merging Two Mediums Simplified Again

I am not a web developer, however, from what information is available that I can understand, HTML5 made it easier to learn coding for small applications with intuitive ideas revolving around one word: Functionality. While coding in HTML5 is simplified, meaning it takes fewer codes to produce the same results, according to the World Wide Web Consortium, it may still be a while before HTML5 is ready to take the reigns completely from its predecessor. What is particularly exciting about HTML5 is video backgrounds being integrated into the HTML coding. This merging of two mediums made for an exciting new flurry of fascinating web applications and opened the door for possible future expansions including the possibility of intigrating video and other media with even less code and coders no longer being responsible for telling the web how to render the media, just where to locate it. 

With HTML5's bringing Adobe's development of flash for mobile device to an end in 2011, many smartphone users will appreciate what HTML5 expansions will continue to offer with hopeful launches of HTML5.1 in 2015/16 and 5.2 not far beyond that.

Looks like fun airsoft practice!

I never cease to be amazed at what Auto-CAD can do. These are sick and I love how detailed they are. I think they would be the perfect secret santa gift for Dwight Schrute given I'm pretty sure he beat all the Halo games the first time he tried. 

In all seriousness I think this will be a great spot for the manufacturing market in 3d printing to enter an ever growing market of video game enthusiasts. Props to artist Khurram Alavi.

A Brief Introduction to the World of Rhetoric

Rhetoric according to Aristotle was the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. But what does that mean? What do people do in the field of rhetoric and why is it important that we learn about it? To understand these things first you must understand the following:

1. A text is anything that communicates.

2. Rhetoric is any text that persuades.

3. Composition is the assembly of a text.

The reality is that rhetoric surrounds you everywhere you go, however, as noted even by Aristotle over 2000 years ago, the true importance lies in our ability to percieve it. The easiest way to start thinking in terms of somethings rhetorical value is to ask yourself if whatever you're percieving is a text composed to persuade you about something? This can be very subtle as in the attire worn to a formal dinner to communicate class or something much more obviouse like the below Macy's advertisements.

Look at how happy she is with her bags from Macy's. This text was composed to persuade you to go to Macy's. Why? Because shopping at Macy's will make you as fashionable and happy-go-lucky as her. This advertisement was designed by a rhetorician, more specifically a marketing agent, somebody who specializes in rhetoric designed to persuade people that they should support you or your product (in this case Macy's). This is only one form of professional rhetoric. Others include the opposite of creating advertisements and instead focuse on deconstructing advertisements and analyzing what is so appealing or what goes unnoticed about the texts themselves. To see this in person check out:

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/tag/jewelry/page/3/

In education rhetoric is important because it teaches us how to construct an argument to persuade others and it teaches us to deconstruct an argument to test its validity. This makes us not only responsible percievers of information, but also responsible communicators.

For more information on and helpful definitions of rhetoric check out the following web page:

http://rhetoric.sdsu.edu/about_us/what_is_rhetoric.htm

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/english/courses/sites/lunsford/pages/defs.htm

Rhetoric and Composition are Different

Rhetoric connotes communication.

Composition is the assembly of a text. Certainly if I write a paper, that is a text, and therefore it communicates and is a form of rhetoric. Even how that paper is composed; typed or written, with pictures or without, the composition makes up a large portion of the rhetorical value of the text. If I built a building, that building will be littered with texts; large windows may imply transparency or access while stucco and cinder may make an appeal to modern styles and the relevancy of the business located there. The texts as a whole communicate whether through written language as in the essay or visual component as in the case of the building and are therefore rhetoric.

That being said if rhetoric is any text that communicates, than composition can be rhetoric but only in the case that the “composition” is describing the formation of a communicable text. If I compose a symphony in my head that is still composition, but it is not rhetoric until that composition can be transcribed into sheet music or otherwise disseminated to others.

It is possible I think that you could term certain types of philosophical viewpoints as forms of rhetoric because of their ability to create an intertextuality in circumstances that would not otherwise communicate. What I’m getting at is essentially a philosophical critique as would be used in debate. For example I recently read an author who proposed that by merely sharing the terminology “digital divide” we are further instigating that divide because people become susceptible to discriminating based on a two party system, those who are able to access technology and those who are not. This thought pattern is communicable through merely circumstance and not a traditional text and is also a form of rhetoric.