Technoscape Proposal

I plan to visual show technology's impact in my surroundings by having a little kid as the center of the piece and message. He will be surrounded by an array of technology and gets happier and happier as he gets the newest and most up-to-date piece of technology. He will be so engaged in what is going on in his digital world that he won't be engaged in what is going around his physical world at all. I am either going to present this idea as a still image or as an animation depending on what images I gather.

I do not plan on using appropriated imagery because I am going to take all my own pictures.

Digital Nation Responses

After watching the video, I realized there was a whole lot more pros and cons about technology than I originally thought existed. In the movie they mentioned many consequences to living in a digital nation. One main issue that seemed to be heavily pointed out was technology and education. Students seem to get distracted quite easily today. They stated that when typing papers, there is no flow or consistency in the paper. Each paragraph is constructed very well, but there is no relation from one paragraph to the next. This is due to checking the cell phone, listening to music, or going on to some social media site. Also, while in class, when students are allowed to have their laptops during lecture they tend to pay less attention to their professor and more to distractions on their computer. This causes students to think they can multitask well, which has been proven that it's not all it's cracked up to be. 

Besides these consequences, there are actually benefits to living in a digital nation. Since there is no escaping technology, then why not incorporate it into a child's everyday learning. Using the internet as a way to engage the students in the classroom as brought such great results. Overall attendance increased and fighting in the school decreased. Students actually wanted to attend to school to learn something. Technology has also brought people closer together. Those who have played in virtual online games together had come to conventions to meet each other. Some got married, some became lifelong friends and it was because they first met over the internet playing a game.

My opinion of technology goes both ways. It definitely has changed the possibilities that we have to create art. Now those possibilities are practically unlimited. I do think that the way we appreciate digital art is much different than traditional art. Unless one has worked with digital art and knows how much time and long tedious effort goes into the creation, I think viewers appreciate the traditional art much more than a digital piece. To an uneducated eye, they may think, oh it was created on the computer so it must have been easy. Rather than actually seeing the dedication that went into a drawing or painting where they can physically see and relate, a digital creation doesn't show that organic-ism for the viewer to relate to. To experience the art is a whole different discussion. With technology we can feel as if we are a part of the piece. It allows for interaction that wasn't offered in the past.

Muybridge Minicinema- City Driving

 I decided to reanimate Muybridge's image sequence by adding/changing the background. I took each frame and cut out everything but the horse and the rider one by one and then added the backgrounds.  I chose to begin the animation with an outdoors scene, where a horse is normally found. Then the horse travels into the city. I wanted to show how horses have always been used for many things, including travel. Although, horses aren't our main sources of travel anymore and we have evolved to mechanical transportation, many people still own horses. They are beautiful creatures and deserve to have a lot of land to roam around in. This shows that if a horse were to break free the only place it could go would be somewhere industrialized, like a city. Humans have almost completely started living and using human made or machine made products. We are loosing the beauty of naturally made resources.

I did use appropriate imagery in this project to form my background. I did not violate copyright law because I used them to create a message for my viewers. I formed a parody, even though it's not funny, it is kind of funny because you don't normally see horses in the city. I also manipulated the city picture by cutting and pasting. The buildings are from one picture and the cement ground is from another picture. They all come together to educate the viewer through the message it gives.

Performance Project- Creepin'

 For my performance I first decided to do a public piece. Many different ideas entered and exited my mind. Some ideas I just didn't have the right environment for and it wasn't until I decided to recreate a performance that we saw in class to know what I wanted to do. The piece that stuck in my head was the Proximity Piece by Vito Acconci. I thought it was really funny how he basically just wanted to make people feel uncomfortable enough to have to walk away from him.

I chose to do this performance at a high school play. I                 went to see Legally Blonde the Musical and during intermission was when I decided to get close to  people. The experience as a whole was very strange and something I don't think I would like to do again. It brought many laughs to me, but I also felt bad because the poor person had no clue what I was doing standing there so close to them. I felt like I was creeping on random people. Some people didn't react        o me standing there at all and some didn't even notice me.Others felt completely uncomfortable so they quickly found someone else to talk to and walked away. I got many weird looks from the people as well.

                                                

This project was a great way of showing how there is this unwritten rule where you have to give a person a certain amount of space. How close can I get to a person without them feeling uncomfortable? Where is that line? I think the majority of people have generally the same reaction to a certain point of closeness. Others have no idea and are just focused on something other than their surroundings, so they don't even notice the close proximity. There are many unwritten rules in the human social life; who are to know what those rules are unless one surpasses them and crosses that line? The question of proximity is just one of those unanswered questions, but a very important one that we must face everyday, once we enter that public world.

Cumulative Acts Proposal

For this assignment I think I plan on working with paint. Not being able to work with paint or pencil for so long has been driving me crazy. I have really been constricted since I am enrolled in two digital art classes and with all my other work I don't have much time to paint on my own time, which is something I would love to do! This assignment is a great opportunity for me to get back in the game.

I plan on selecting a few amount of colors of paint and choosing a different color for each day of the week. I want to allow the paint to add color for a background of my doodles. I want to create a bunch of blind doodles on the paper. I will then look at all I created and pick the ones that made an actually picture out of. I really want to work big so I plan on making a collage almost.

By the end of the semester I think my work of art will take on a layered, but organized look. There will be many colors and many little doodles all on one big canvas. This will show my process of creation. The build of of many days of paint and doodles... over a long period of time. It will be able to stand on its own because it will be visually aesthetic and it will show time because of the array of doodles and color of the paint.

An Array of Music

I chose to map out one of my favorite songs by Shania Twain called Any Man of Mine. I knew from the start that I wanted to map out music because it is a big part of my life, it was just a matter of how to do so. Shania Twain is my favorite artist of all times so it was inevitable that the song I was going to choose was by her.

The way I constructed the image took a lot of thinking because I was very unsure about that part. What I finally came up with was assigning different colors and different shapes to different parts of the song. The blue horizontal stripes are the lyrics in the song and they are shown by swirls and the bigger the swirl the longer she held the duration of the note for each word. The pink circles are all the words in the song that rhyme. Not necessarily with each other, but the total amount of words that had a rhyming partner. The green lines that surround the pink circles are a representation of the beat of the main refrain of the song. The green lines on the sides are the basic beat of the rest of the song (before and after each chorus). The green squiggly line in the middle represents the violin solo in the song. The way the piece is set up as a whole is to show music as a whole. The green lines on the sides show music levels when sound is played and the blue horizontal lines act as sound waves passing by the screen.

I think my piece conveys a curious mood because at a first look its not clear what is going on and so you are really curious as to what is happening. Once the viewer realizes it is a piece based upon music then the image becomes more clear. I think the black background also adds to that curious mood, giving it a little bit of a psychedelic feel.

Four Seasons