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Base picture for my painting of “Bujiis, 388″

I began the project painting. This medium seemed far enough away from the digital that I could decontextualise the information so that the viewers could see ideas that I was trying to express and take a step back from the digital world when looking at it.

My first painting is called “Bujiis, 388″. With this painting I aim to express the distortion of our friendships and social connections by giving so much value to the numerical side of our profile. The amount of friends we have on facebook serves the same function as a level indicator in a video game. We make snap decisions when we see a persons Facebook profile that take the place of the snap decisions we make when we first meet a person: When we see someone with thousands of friends we give their opinions and actions and actions more value because we know that they reach more people.... In a weird sense, the people with the most friends on social media are similar to the loudest people in a crowded room.

I took this into account when trying to find a portrait to draw. I decided that the amount of people that see an individual on social media dictates how much they exist (how big a “presence” they have on social media). The validation of ones existence online is based on how many people hear them online (or a number: “friends: 388″). I painted Bujan with 388 brushstrokes, representative of his 388 friends. The less people you know the less you exist in the painting.

I would love to do a series of these paintings to better illustrate this point and not have to write a blurb explaining the joke next to the painting.

#Cool3

Transformation of my Final Outcomes

As secondary research came along I began to observe social behavior on sites like Facebook, or Instagram. The manner in which we redefined our identities when we are online online and the importance we gave to numbers when it comes to how we value our online “presence” almost as if we cease to exist or begin to fade, like Marty in “Back to the Future”, if we don’t continuously remind more and more people of our very existence. It seems to promote business-like behavior in peoples personal lives... We feel the need to turn our own selves into a brand, and act as if all our activities have a vastly greater influence on the world than they should. Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton’s acquisition of fame, and after social media platforms like Youtube, Vine, Instagram, and Facebook created their own starlets, the definition of “Celebrity” has become more and more blurred.... when on these sites people are goaded with the possibility that if they record the right thing or say the right thing the could “go viral” at any given moment and receive a taste of fame (which is another way of saying “mass social affection”, something that humans are kind of hardwired to love). It acts as a sort of carrot for us to continuously use these platforms and is shaping the face of social human interactions.

The more time I spent on these sites and on the computer the more I began to hate these sites and what the whole “digital revolution” and “age of information” represented. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but it began to make me feel like we were being farmed by the companies that ran these websites. Subsequently I began to withdraw from digital interfaces more and more... I thought “if I could represent these Ideas in a different, analogue and visceral format, maybe they would be easier to digest”. That, and some helpful suggestions from my tutors lead me to try paintings.

#Cool3

Design Domain Year 2: Cool 3

Design Domain, this year, was all about the word “Transform” and all of it’s different meanings. This being design domain, the general theme was gear around design projects that would be more functional. However this is art school and we must be hipsters and convoluted because it totally makes life easier for those around us. The word “Transforms” led me to “evolutions” and the concept of “cocoons”. The act of transforming is a reaction to a force that changes something completely.

This led me to the way species transform to adapt to the different situations that they are placed in.

What better example than our own species. We are in the middle of a very unique phenomenon which is the evolution and transportation of our behavior and even physical form due to circumstances that we have created for ourselves. The creation of the internet and its subsequent, extensive use has changed our behavior and is still changing it. We are becoming more and more like hive minded creatures....similar to organisms that we would consider ourselves very different from: bees, ants, and siphonophores.

#Cool3

Cool 2

There are a few ways that I could approach this project.

1. Finding the average of all of the color on the screen and then turn that into a single number. Then use that number to effect one single aspect of a sound wave.

2. Divide the image into pixels and find the amount of Red Green and Blue in the images and then use those three numbers to affect a sound wave.

3. Divide the image into larger pixels and then get the color from each of those pixels. Find the averages of the Reds, the Greens, and the Blues and then use those unique numbers to affect the sound wave.

I think that number 3 is the best Idea but it might not be achievable.

#Cool2

The key to getting the sounds from the color of images is to make the images more accessible. If the images are pixilated, there are less colors to work with and the colors are more of an average. Using pixilated images allows the sound of the video being used to be found more easily.

#Cool2

Cool 2

The second project of the year was called “Make Some Noise”. The class was required to use sound in our digital, interactive media and combine visuals and sound in a creative way.

My take on this concept was to use color, the changing of color and the way that code in processing could map live changes in color to different sounds. This lead me to the idea of taking audio snapshots, changing a visual image into a sonic experience (sort of like the poor man’s sonar but with color). However an issue came about because of the lack of human’s context with sound as a form of spacial recognition. The familiarity that we have with human interpretations of visual and audio information can’t be easily switched (seeing with sound wont make an sense because sound doesn’t = shapes/colors in our brain).

So, to make the audio more understandable when in the context of images, I decided to make live audio portraits. The portraits are easier because they all have the same background color (white) meaning the only variation in sound will be from the variation in color in the interactees’ faces :) woohoo

#Cool2

Pixel-sorted images are interesting to everyone I am sure. They perfectly sum up what I love about art...That beauty that doesn’t really make cense, doesn’t really have a point (or is made for a specific reason) and we don’t really understand why we like it. The only thing that we know for sure about pixel-mapped images is that they are way cooler than the original images.

Why is that? Who the fuck cares? Cant we just enjoy them for the weird and personal reasons that we have? I was toying around with some code that attempted to map stars and draw lines down from them in an image. this began to look very similar to pixel-mapped images. Paul (my tutor) had the genius idea of instead of trying to just make images out of these, use videos, so we can control and se the effects being created live.

If Im telling the truth, the whole idea of creating something that could act as a crude tool for us to change our lenses through which we view the stars (my previous blog entry) was bullshit that I liked the sound of. It worked with what I had made and it sounded “deep”. Didn’t really sound too “deep”, you probably saw right through it but whatever. The truth is, that I was interested in making nice visuals that also challenged my limited programming capability. I dont pretend to be able to make “art” yet..I have nothing to say. I like pixel-mapped images... they make my brain tingle, and I wanted to make something else like that. I just wanted to make and interesting image that sparked other peoples imagination. So crew you god.

#Cool1 #year2

The wonders of the Universe!

I have always been interested in astronomy and the beautiful small feeling we get as a species when we look up at the night sky. Time lapse videos have especially mesmerizing because of their enhancement of this feeling. as we see the stars move around us through a camera, it reminds us of a camera mounted on a car, or other moving object. We begin to realize that it is not the stars moving in the sky but our planet moving, spinning in a sea of other stars, billions of miles away countless times our size.

I began thinking about our grasp of this concept as a species. As tenuous as it seems now, we are far more informed than when we first started to “organize” the night sky.

We used crude tools to measure and analyze things that we could never hope to understand (especially then).

Even now we add a purely scientific analysis to stars, labeling them as purely balls of gas that only exist to give off heat and light. Not knowing the influence and history and context that these stars could and probably do have on their solar systems and anything that is in contact with them. Imagine if orions belt was missing a star. Orion wouldn’t have a belt. and also the universe as we know it would probably be completely different. Another thing to think about is that we are all actually made of star dust. We were all created from the same big bang.

I digress. Basically, it would be really cool to make some sort of customizable constellation, or to be able to play with and change the filter through which we view these amazing balls of gas.

#Cool1 #year2

Cool 1

cool 1 is a really cool project about cool ass stuff. I love how cool it is and how cool it was to make. To make cool 1 I used this really cool program called Processing in combination with this other really cool program called Arduino to make a piece of artistic digital media that I could effect with analogue controls.

#Cool1 #year2

Beginning year 2!

This is basically a place parker. I am gonna do this blog better than last year. I swear. I just need to live my life in front of this here screen...starting now......now.....NOW!....ok maybe starting tomorrow.

To create galaxies in maya, I used particles and mapped the particle color and their position based off of the colored image and the black and white one, respectively. The position was mapped through the black an white one like displacement mapping, however the displacement is applied to the individual voxels being genereated.

#Maya

For the best viewing experience, use the YouTube App on mobile! Stand atop an Archer tower as giants, dragons, balloons, hog riders and barbarians descend up...

Virtua reality??? dont even care that its misspelllled. YOLO!!! nerd life on the edge.

#Maya

Starting Maya

I have already done some maya, but we never really got into the lighting that Gillian took us through in that first lesson. Boy howdy. Im having trouble reproducing all of the steps that she used to create the shadows. I really need to learn how to sculpt also. Im going to try to sculpt some things in mudbox. I don’t really know what to do yet. I really want to make a desert or ocean that could move with music but I think that is a bit too ambitious.

#Maya

Do you know where the happiest people on Earth live? You must've answered "Denmark". And you're wrong.

I don’t know how much of this site is exaggerated but if it is legit that is pretty awesome the Piraha live their lives. You should give this a read :)

#SOUNDSCAPES

This is My web app. I am still gonna work on it but it’s just that Im doing other projects now. The idea is to have the entire screen be green because of all of the tree icons covering it. As the icons disappear the message that I have written appears. Since 43% of the earths trees have been cut down in the minute that humans have existed on the planet. I designed 43% of all of the tree icons to disappear in 1 minute. It is a bitch to make all of the tree icons in the array and then to make specific one disappear. My next step in the project is to make tons more icons until the screen is covered. Also centering the writing and giving it borders so that it doesn’t change with the screen size. The whole point of this is to “shock” the audience into realizing exactly how many trees we have cut down and how unhealthy what we are doing is.

#WEBAPPS

Don’t fact check this but on of the websites that I found while researching the Piraha. I kid you not there was an entry on the Piraha on the Tai Chi Ireland website.

http://taichi-ireland.com/2014/11/10/piraha/

But Basically they talk about the Piraha as rejecting missionaries for over 300 years because none of them had seen Jesus in person and therefore it went against their logic. nI don’t know if this i true but I kind of hope it is :)

#SOUNDSCAPES

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The Course formerly known as Digital Culture