Project 3 – animation

From the start I new I wanted to do an animation but I didn’t know what I wanted to use. I then decided to use a board game to animate the pieces on the board. I wanted to use a very basic yet well known game, so I chose I childhood favorite, Candy Land. I took hundreds of pictures so that the candy land gingerbread figures seem to dance around, moving in circles to make it look like they are playing together. Once I completed the video, I was unsure of what sort of audio to use. I decided that I wanted to find music, or multiple songs to combine, that had a quick rhythm or beat to go along with the movement of the gingerbread figures. I wanted to use something childish yet not boring, I wanted to find music that would be thought of as surprising or ironic to go along with the dancing Candy Land figures. I contemplated using some sort of scary music but I still wanted the song to be upbeat and cartoon like so that it matched the animation I produced. After searching on iTunes, I chose songs from the movies “Beetlejuice” and “Nightmare before Christmas”, both cartoon children movies yet with a sort of scary or Halloween influence. The three songs I picked and combined together had exactly what I was looking for. The music is not what you would expect to go with a candy land board game, yet it the tempo and style are perfect for the dancing animation. I put the three songs in order of increasing childish horror influence, if that makes any sense… the first song is innocent and seems like music ballerinas would dance to, the second is much more upbeat and has drums, clocks, and a mischievous sound to it. The third and final song, is the most creepy so it is fitting that in the end, the four gingerbread figures fall back, seemingly dead, one by one. 

Mark Napier’s “Shredder” (1998)

This other work of Mark Napier is in a way similar to FEED, that with the user’s help “slices and dices everything in its path, turning any Web page into what could be mistaken for a work of abstract digital art”. Through Shredder, you can choose any URL or pick one of the bookmarked options. Shredder was much quicker in producing its outcome, literally destructing the website into colors, text and numbers. I tried out a few other websites besides the bookmarked ones and it was interesting to see the colors and familiar aspects from the original websites that became distorted and abstract. While FEED took sometimes minutes to finish developing more colors and shapes, Shredder only took a few moments. I found the FEED website to be slightly more amusing because I would enjoy watching it evolve, it was very entertaining to watch the colors move and have more and more appear. Mark Napier’s work is not only interesting in what it produces, but it is also intriguing because of how it is interactive and involves the user to type in a URL or choose one before the “art” is made. 

link to FEED website

http://feed.projects.sfmoma.org/feedloader.html

 

Mark Napier’s work

After reading the article “Art in the age of digital distribution” I was particularly interested in the reference to Mark Napier’s “FEED” website from 2001. I checked it out myself along with some of his other work, which was all very interesting. The Feed website sort of unravels the web and consumes the information provided in a website. Once you select a URL, feed reduces the “meaning and content to a stream of text and pixels” which basically looks like colors appearing in line graphs, pixelated grids, and scatter charts. It’s entertaining to watch and it’s hard to remind yourself that this is apparently a website you’re really looking at. Though there are only certain URLs to choose from, each looks very different from the others in the colors that are displayed, how they appear, and the text shown. 

Assignment 2 – Constructed Reality

The weekend before we began working on this project, I was in Arizona with my mom and decided to take my pictures there. I have always had a great appreciation for landscape photos as well as the beauty of mountain ranges. I took many pictures unsure of what I wanted to do with them, so when I was in class I decided to use multiple photos togethter to create a panoramic view. I chose photographs that weren’t next necessarily next to each other but lined them up so they could look like they connected. I also changed the sky in each of them, taking different sky views during the sunset from other photos. I lined up the landscapes so that the mountains connected but the edges did not. I also used tools on photoshop to make it look like the mountains and the grass beneath them really were all one view even though they weren’t and some were different colors because of the setting sun. I wanted to show different points of the sunset through the various views of sky as well as accurately and believably combine photos that were not meant to be connected. This way, you can tell that the sky above the mountains is obviously not meant to go together, yet the bottom half of the photos seem to. I liked the combination and construction of a half impossible and half plausible view of this landscape.

Intention and Artifice article response

This article was a little confusing at times but it had great points, I was not aware of many instances there have been with photographers creating false representations of supposedly historical events. I appreciate manipulated photography as art but I did not know the extent to which people used it. It’s hard to imagine how far we’ve come with technology and how now, when viewing a photo, you must first assume it is false as opposed to representing something real and true, or even “as signifiers with stable meaning and value”. I found it very interesting how the article compared a photographer to a predator on the hunt. It seems a shame now that photographers often do not even have the integrity to search and wait for that perfect picture but instead create it falsely.

Reality Bytes article response

This article brings up very interesting points, though classic and unaltered photography is meaningful and true. The invention of photoshop has brought a whole new kind of photography. This new photography is more of a piece of work, an art that the photographer spends time working on so that they can rely the message they want. I found Gutschow and Frydlender’s work to be especially intriguing because of how their work defies time and space. I agree with Shambroom in that digitally altered photos should still look real; the art of using photoshop on real photographs should work so that the person doesn’t immediately doubt that the photo is real. It should make them question, wonder and contemplate, and I think that although untouched photos are special, this new kind is much more thought provoking and interesting.

Altered States article response

This article really connects with our discussions about the increasing technology of today affects art in how there are new products every year, changing the way we take photos. Though the use of this new technology like photoshop can produce a new and interesting kind of photo, sometimes the dated or classic kinds are best. While Kodak might have decided black and white printing papers are old-fashioned, a black and white photo can often be the most powerful kind. Sometimes one could think technology has destroyed the traditional, timeless type of art.