or course there's work to do. gotta find some fonts and align everything perfect. but i'm pretty pleased with it so far.
Monday, September 28, 2009
poster rough draft
or course there's work to do. gotta find some fonts and align everything perfect. but i'm pretty pleased with it so far.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Portrait Assignment
Conceptual Statement
My project was somewhat inspired by Paul Smith's work from the read- ing. He used his concept of Projected Self to make a himself appear courageous, even though his true self was not. Feeling he was too big a coward to do things like jump from building to building, or parachute from an airplane, he found he could live those fantasies by digitally placing himself into these scenarios.
I found this approach to be very vain and childish. My friends and I bas- ically learned Photoshop having done the same thing for our Myspace pages for years now (example: The Artist as Snoop Dogg, 2003). Perhaps Smith had more courage than he thinks, if has the audacity to call that art.
My project intends to be a statement on the idea of the struggling art- ist. I have happily waited tables for the last 6 years to support a life of music and art. While I may not be able to afford all the things I would like, I keep food in my refrigerator, and enough in my bank account to go on the occasional vacation and splurge on my girlfriend every now and then. Life is good, even if I've never gone sky-diving, or held a sub- machine gun.
I realize how lucky I am. I also realize how bad some people have it. So for my Projected Self Portraits I took photographs of me enjoying my life (some were taken explicitly for the project, while others are of vac- ations, long bike rides, and parties), and superimposed them into scen- arios of true misfortune. The more heartbreaking and brutal, the better. I wanted the photos to make me look stupid, spoiled and arrogant by comparison. My goal is to make myself as well as the viewer not just feel thankful, but almost guilty for everything they are fortunate enough to have. Because when it all boils down to it, dumb luck is all we really have going for us.
Photo credits: Getty Images, AP photo, Rafiq Maqbool, Dorthea Lange, Word of Photos, and Reuters.
Technical/Formal Points
Each photo was done pretty much the same way. First I would cut a picture of my face using the selection tool. Next I would resize it using the Auto-select and the Free Transform options. Step three was to mask out any part of my face that didn't belong in the composition, occas- ionally using a different flows and opacities to blend towards the back- ground photograph. The final, and most time-consuming task was to match the color, focus and photo quality of the original photograph. This was accomplished with mainly level and curve adjustments to match the values, and Filters to match focus and photo grain.
Once I did had the images looking proper, I changed the resolution to 300 DPI. A few more filters (Unsharp Mask and, Dust and Scratches did the trick) to add pop and lose some of the jpeg artifacts grom the dark- er tones, and the images are set for print! I was able to finish all but two of the pieces in class. One unfinished piece was black and white, and the other was a color image. The hurricane picture that I worked on at home tells you how important color profiles are, because although it looked absolutely perfect on my computer at home, looking at it here on these Mac monitors it looks undoubtedly Photoshopped.
My project was somewhat inspired by Paul Smith's work from the read- ing. He used his concept of Projected Self to make a himself appear courageous, even though his true self was not. Feeling he was too big a coward to do things like jump from building to building, or parachute from an airplane, he found he could live those fantasies by digitally placing himself into these scenarios.
I found this approach to be very vain and childish. My friends and I bas- ically learned Photoshop having done the same thing for our Myspace pages for years now (example: The Artist as Snoop Dogg, 2003). Perhaps Smith had more courage than he thinks, if has the audacity to call that art.
My project intends to be a statement on the idea of the struggling art- ist. I have happily waited tables for the last 6 years to support a life of music and art. While I may not be able to afford all the things I would like, I keep food in my refrigerator, and enough in my bank account to go on the occasional vacation and splurge on my girlfriend every now and then. Life is good, even if I've never gone sky-diving, or held a sub- machine gun.
I realize how lucky I am. I also realize how bad some people have it. So for my Projected Self Portraits I took photographs of me enjoying my life (some were taken explicitly for the project, while others are of vac- ations, long bike rides, and parties), and superimposed them into scen- arios of true misfortune. The more heartbreaking and brutal, the better. I wanted the photos to make me look stupid, spoiled and arrogant by comparison. My goal is to make myself as well as the viewer not just feel thankful, but almost guilty for everything they are fortunate enough to have. Because when it all boils down to it, dumb luck is all we really have going for us.
Photo credits: Getty Images, AP photo, Rafiq Maqbool, Dorthea Lange, Word of Photos, and Reuters.
Technical/Formal Points
Each photo was done pretty much the same way. First I would cut a picture of my face using the selection tool. Next I would resize it using the Auto-select and the Free Transform options. Step three was to mask out any part of my face that didn't belong in the composition, occas- ionally using a different flows and opacities to blend towards the back- ground photograph. The final, and most time-consuming task was to match the color, focus and photo quality of the original photograph. This was accomplished with mainly level and curve adjustments to match the values, and Filters to match focus and photo grain.
Once I did had the images looking proper, I changed the resolution to 300 DPI. A few more filters (Unsharp Mask and, Dust and Scratches did the trick) to add pop and lose some of the jpeg artifacts grom the dark- er tones, and the images are set for print! I was able to finish all but two of the pieces in class. One unfinished piece was black and white, and the other was a color image. The hurricane picture that I worked on at home tells you how important color profiles are, because although it looked absolutely perfect on my computer at home, looking at it here on these Mac monitors it looks undoubtedly Photoshopped.
Museum Response
This weekend I attended the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. I was sad to see that much of the museum was actually temporarily closed to set up new exhibits. While there wasn't much to see on that day, there was a still a fine example of Digital Art on display.
On entering the building, I was drawn immediately to Kevin O'Conell's exhibit, "Everything Comes Broken". He was set up on the first floor next to the windows, directly over the 14th St. underpass. I found this clever because of the use of audio in his installation. I walked to the windows thinking that the audio from the installation was actually some strange resonance caused by the traffic directly below. The sound instead drew me not to the window, but around the corner into O'Conell's Digital Media display.
The darkened room had three projections on three walls. Each wall showing a different view of a rural windfarm. The sound was a rich laying of mechanical noises; disorienting, but organic. The projections gave the feel that you were truly standing in the vast expanse of a Wyoming prairie, engulfed by all the corresponding sights and sounds.
The piece could have been saying that wind energy is the wave of the future, with the viewer taking note of the "2001"-esque, elegant starkness of the turbines. But when you take note of the cacophonic audio piped into the dark room, the message seems to be a bit dark, surely not as superficial as green energy.
The piece seemed to me to speak of the wind itself, the audio swelling in time with the long shadow of the turbine. Drawing attention to the futuristic windmill, touted as the wave of the future; but in all actuality is one of civilization's oldest inventions. A clever irony suggesting that maybe the future isn't all it's cracked up to be; or a new twist on an old cliche, maybe old is the new new.
On entering the building, I was drawn immediately to Kevin O'Conell's exhibit, "Everything Comes Broken". He was set up on the first floor next to the windows, directly over the 14th St. underpass. I found this clever because of the use of audio in his installation. I walked to the windows thinking that the audio from the installation was actually some strange resonance caused by the traffic directly below. The sound instead drew me not to the window, but around the corner into O'Conell's Digital Media display.
The darkened room had three projections on three walls. Each wall showing a different view of a rural windfarm. The sound was a rich laying of mechanical noises; disorienting, but organic. The projections gave the feel that you were truly standing in the vast expanse of a Wyoming prairie, engulfed by all the corresponding sights and sounds.
The piece could have been saying that wind energy is the wave of the future, with the viewer taking note of the "2001"-esque, elegant starkness of the turbines. But when you take note of the cacophonic audio piped into the dark room, the message seems to be a bit dark, surely not as superficial as green energy.
The piece seemed to me to speak of the wind itself, the audio swelling in time with the long shadow of the turbine. Drawing attention to the futuristic windmill, touted as the wave of the future; but in all actuality is one of civilization's oldest inventions. A clever irony suggesting that maybe the future isn't all it's cracked up to be; or a new twist on an old cliche, maybe old is the new new.
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