Small digital art piece

 I went and had a look at the old windows '95 and '98 icons and was hit by a wave of nostalgia. I may have been young back then but I thoroughly remember getting our family home computer and using it to go online, play space pinball and draw on paint and photoshop (Mum had a copy from her Uni)

The story behind this is that I was sat on a college computer (The one I'm on right now!) a few days ago and Photoshop had expired on it (it's still expired) but I really wanted to make a picture.

I resorted to Powerpoint... and made this!
I was looking to make something inspired by all the images I found when googling for 'Networks'
I like it's unpolishedness, the way it does look a bit like a business presentation about 'intranets' or 'Peer to peer technology'.

I find these clipart images (and the things which turn up on google when you search for arbitrary things) really quite inspiring.

Artist: Wavegrower

'perspectives' - Wavegrower May 2015

Wavegrower is a Gif artist I've been following for over a year and a half now. His Tumblr blog is only 2 years old. Wavegrower aka Frédéric Vayssouze-Faure calls himself an 'Ondulist' - Someone who studies oscillations and waves. All of his work is as a gif or video and made using a coding language called 'Processing.js'. Processing is an open-source project to make a language that is designed for artists. Processing has a considerably large artist-mathematitian-coder 

'I’m Frédéric Vayssouze-Faure, a french guy fascinated by wave phenomenons and the vibrating guitar string harmonics theory, therefore inspired by periodic motions in general, and by the purest and smoothest of them in particular : those which are ruled by the sine function.

This blog is a branch of the wavegrower project in which I’m focused on combining minimalism and multitude to create dynamic artworks with more than one level of reading, the first being that every cell constituting them has its own simple periodic motion, meaning regularly looping by spinning or twisting or stretching or balancing or revolving or swinging or shaking or beating or vibrating, in a word : oscillating.'

'For those who ask for my source code: I’ve post some in OpenProcessing here, they all use the same Ondulator class I’ve built to fit my creative needs (basically making multiple simple cells oscillate the way I want). You may find it heavy (“You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle” :), but there’s also an aesthetic intention behind: let all this pieces be particular occurences of a more general pattern, come from the same mold despite their specificities, like brothers. '

That last sentence, 'let all this pieces be particular occurences of a more general pattern, come from the same mold despite their specificities, like brothers.' Frédéric is describing the way in which the very very simple motion of each dot up and down also forms a wave which travels along the surface. Just like waves in the sea or ripples in water- the h2o particles move up and down, side to side but generally stay in the same place but from our perspective we see a continuous wave on the surface, traveling outward.

All of this interests me very much but I'ts not what my project is about. I wanted to focus on Wavegrower's medium: Gifs.

I have shown you somebody I consider to be an 'online artist'. His animations are mesmerising, meditative, calming, satisfying, informing.

'Nefertiti: Hack'

http://nefertitihack.alloversky.com/

Two artists- Jan Nelles and Nora Al-Badri covertly scanned the rare artifact of a bust of Nefertiti (currently in show in Berlin) using a hacked xbox kinect and released the 3D scan for free online. They also posted a video of them pulling off the 'heist'.This has sparked an argument between two museums but also a large discussion over the ethics of sharing and reproducing artifacts. But now another controversy has struck the Nefertiti: hack; many experts have confirmed that the quality of the Nefertiti 3D scan is far beyond the quality that a kinect can achieve meaning that the artists must have stolen the 3D file from the museum that owns the bust who had hi quality scans made of some of their collection (but not available publicly). Hacking and stealing is far more illegal!

So.. in an age that many museums and art galleries have full digital archives that are publicly available online and we have websites like the internet archive- should museums and art galleries be allowed to with hold digital images of pieces?
Here is an argument for the sharing of this data from 3D artist, Cozmo Wenman:

Link to Full post: https://cosmowenman.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/the-nefertiti-3d-scan-heist-is-a-hoax/

Link to Hyperallergic article which seemed to kick off the public attention:
http://hyperallergic.com/274635/artists-covertly-scan-bust-of-nefertiti-and-release-the-data-for-free-online/

Artists have already produced all sorts of things from the 3D file and many people have 3D printed their own busts.
I will look for a few examples of art that's been made... but first I need to go to sleep!

'New Aesthetics' Animations

Hello! This Blog is a continuation of the previous one where I made some art using only tools provided within Photoshop. About five days ago, I decided to try extending the challenge to video and this time using Adobe AfterEffects.
This first animation is once again inspired by 'New Aesthetic' with a focus on the glitches of old VHS. The sky was originally sideways by accident but I decided that I liked the oddness of that.
The original video of this looks much cleaner, the Gif making process lowers the animation quality considerably. You can really change the way a Gif looks depending on the way you export it- I have messed around with this a bit before and now try to use it to help convey the style of my animation.
Maybe I should exploit and explore the Gif compression process.

As you can see, the next animation I made is much, much smoother- in its visual qualities as well as animation. You have to limit the size of a Gif considerably (below 2-3mb usually) so I have to make tradeoffs. In this animation I chose to keep more frames so that the movement wasn't more jerky but I had to use a smaller colour palette and 'flat' shading. This animation went through a lot of iterations to get to this stage. I have over 20 different versions, each experimenting with or developing the Animation:

The process is kinda simple (this isn't the only way I make animations.. this is one example!) to execute but hard to make something that looks good and not too overproduced. Sometimes you come out with something that looks a little bit shitty and some animations never get finished but inspire another three. I find this Process really quite experimental; it's about moving layers around and blending or pushing pixels and just seeing how that affects the way something looks. The process is quite instant and due to being digital I can make infinite copies to modify further.

Then things got Blobby! I found a group of effects for simulating and generating and ended up spending a lot of time fiddling with the physics variables and enjoyed myself a lot. 

Now we're exploding things! we're exploding patterns into other patterns!

I think each of these ones show how my animations can become iterative- inspiration comes from the previous animation and then I push other aspects to explore the possibilities and keep things fresh.

I never seem to ever really settle on a style. Maybe because I get bored, maybe because I feel some artists are lazy and unadventurous and don't push their style more vigorously.

This animation looks more controlled- Like someone got involved and restored some order to the chaos of the flying shapes. That's because someone did.
It was me!      Oh... you're not surprised.

More polishing! Things become square for Gif format and Instagram. I crop the eye-buzzing shapes into an organised group of eye-buzzing shapes. But most importantly: we have a loop!!
The animation ends where it begins....  isn't that such a beautiful thing?
It is to me! The video is seamless (hopefully...*), hypnotically repeating in a way that seems to draw our eyes in and grab our attention.

*there's a twitch in the one above and possibly in the one below too... kinda infuriating, I know.

And here, finally, is something that looks really quite nice! It might still not be complete though, the evolution continues...  What if it all slowly span around? or the background was a gradient or we put some other small effect on it to finish it off.

And then after that explore through After Effects, I decided to trace my steps back to the original task and style- some 'Ironic internet art'.
Utilising the transparent background texture itself as the meat of the image but also the frame. It's a bit like a painting in my mind, one that moves. The excited wobbling lightning is a bright, sharp focus for our eye. The lightning is a built in effect as well, of course.

I feel like I've written plenty here already so I'm afraid you're getting no final conclusion... I'll probably continue this anyway. I projected some of these animations on my face two nights ago and the footage is quite funny...
To be Continued! -as always

'New aesthetic'

This week I decided to make some 'New Aesthetic' images in Photoshop. This was the result of a few inspirations and a challenge I set upon myself. I wanted to try and generate art entirely within Photoshop, not based on any other images or drawings. Instead I used gradients, patterns, textures and effects to make this series.

I like the pixellated, cheesy graphics and I think they look really quite digital in that slightly shit-over-produced kinda way. pastel gradients, drop shadows and lo rez textures.

'New Aesthetic' borrows from a lot of styles but there is quite a big influence from 90s and 80s. I'll write another blog post about it. This one is smoother and less gritty.

Detail.. if you zoom in you can see the pixels. Andy was talking to me about printing things out massive on multiple sheets of paper and sticking them together... possibly collaging it!

'Oil'

And to top it off, some typography!
I've continued doing these and have been enjoying it. I consider these images somewhat like digital sketches. Or maybe painting or collages...  or something else?
I have been trying this challenge of art generated purely within a program with Adobe After effects, a popular video effects software. I will also post these here on the blog and also show how I save them online.

'Mixed Reality Contiuum'

An interesting short video about technologies with different levels of digital immersion. They look at windows within our reality into the digital world and vice versa.
Could I make some kind of art that digitizes real things or realises things from digital?

Unit 11 Progression

I have rounded up all of the files that are relevant to my Progression unit.
Included in this folder are:
Crit presentation documents, My CV, A document about progression options and choices, an old rejected personal statement and an application letter to the Erasmus+ Scheme.

Here is the link: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B7oE2DlPL6jZV3NfUjRabmF4VHM&usp=sharing

Thanks

Connoisseur - Norman Rockwell 1961