Guest Critic Response

Having guest critic Yoonjai Choi come on Friday to review my work was a great experience. She immediately addressed how the work provides a different experience for the viewer when they first see it from a distance and then get up close to it. Like a real painting, the image begins to break apart when the viewer is close to it and reveals the individual images I used to create it. Yoonjai said the most interesting part of the image is when you are close to it. She said the way the left and right dissolve away was cool but that it was almost like I am "revealing my trick." For a process book, I am making for the project, I am going to have many cropped images of details of the piece which is similar to the ideas Yoonjai was conveying to me. I also explained that the main reasons to have the images break apart, besides the fact that it looks cool, was to show how the skin tones are being optically mixed, like in with real bush strokes or pixels. We also addressed the issue of how each image I used comes charged with it's own little narrative. Due to time constraints, and other factors, making a portrait comprised of pictures, each with a specific meaning would have been near impossible. This was definitely an issue I had thought about while making the piece. However, the piece is about controlling external imagery that surrounds us, so the randomness of the images I think supports that idea of the project. Also, the technology aspect of the project is supported by this randomness because it is all based on what Google Images provided for me in my searches. Overall, Yoonjai said it was a great project and thought I must be a very patient person.

February 7, 2011

Today I had a major breakthrough that will allow me to speed up my process and create a much better image. I found out that in a Google image search you can select a specific color from 10 choices. As Google searches through millions of images, the ones with the most pixels of the specified color appear at the top of the search results. This tool will allow me to not specify colors in my text search and just use keywords like fox or watermelon, and then select the respective color I need. I can also toggle between colors using the same search keyword. This has also greatly increased the image library that I will be able to pull from for my piece.

February 3, 2011

I have begun rendering my face with images I have found on Google. I am starting with my lips and will build out from there The main features of my face (mouth, nose, eyes) must be rendered very accurately in order to capture a likeness to me. However, I figure after these are nailed down I can be much more liberal with images I use for the rest of the image. The process is extremely slow and tedious. I am using words like red meat and red pepper as keywords for my image searches. The key to creating the image I have in mind will be to control the blacks and lightest part of the pictures I use, just like in real painting.

Studio Journal: Public Service Announcement

My latest design project is to create a series of three PSAs that relate to our thesis focus. I immediately recalled PSAs that I thought were most effective and tried to determine in what ways they had made me remember their message. I concluded that many successful PSAs were very blunt in their language, using a dry humor to quickly and forcefully connect with their viewer. My series is titled, "Hire A Designer." I though of it as an ad campaign for AIGA in support of designers. The images I created for the 3 posters are all a "badly designed" object placed into a space that one might expect to see a "higher" level of design. The objects I chose are all real products that I found online. I included the tag line "Design surrounds us every minute of everyday. Let's make it good," because it is sort of a dry response to the classic what is "good" design argument. Also, the posters are meant to spark conversation between viewers as to whether the designs of the objects are in fact bad, and who can really make that call. After all, some one at some point thought they were good.

Studio Journal: A New Cliche

This next project for Design III was called "A New Cliche." My class was assigned to refine a cliche that exists in our world. We then also had to find some way to distribute our "new cliche" to the public. To quote the assignment sheet, "This project is about the possibilities that lie in referencing shared knowledge; in altering meaning through repetition; and in knowing and
involving your audience." I wanted to create a piece that was not distributed but rather a performance piece in which when others interacted with myself, I create my "new cliche." I finally arrived at a graphic that I believe has much more gravity than people realize these days, and a graphic that is actually quite beautiful in itself. In illustrator I recreated the infamous Macintosh "Pinwheel of Death." For non-mac users, this is a little colorful pinwheel that your mouse morphs into during periods of computer overload and/or processing. I rigged an arm attachment to my constructed pinwheel, in a shield like fashion and bolted the wheel onto another piece of cardboard. The nut and bolt attachment enabled the pinwheel to really spin, which in turn enabled me to mimic the motion and aesthetic of the "Pinwheel of Death" in a large public setting. My idea was to appear in situations like a city street corner during rush hour, a place filled with congested people who are barely moving anywhere. When they see my wheel in action it triggers many emotions, but most likely gives them flash backs of a time when their computer was in a slow process like they are currently in. I felt the project was a success and the feedback I have gotten on and off the street was overwhelmingly positive. I have included a picture that I have taken on George Street during rush hour.

Studio Journal: Information Graphic

My next project in Design III, was a data set. For this assignment, we had to create an info graphic that represented a set or sets of data that related to our personal life. Similar to our first assignment, the data set project required us to examine our personal lives and extract information that we normally may not ever analyze or quantify. After much thought, I decided to examine my cigarette smoking, confident that it would provide substantial and provocative data that I could use to create an info graphic. I began by counting the average cigarettes I have smoked per day starting in 2005. I surprisingly have a good memory for this kind of stuff, so my numbers turned out pretty accurate. My first set of graphs were divided up by year and represented the average number of cigarettes I smoked per day by monthly. The bar graphs were created by burning cigarettes, therefore giving varying heights to the "bars." I then put a color overlay over the cigarettes to color code them by brand. Next, I employed a line graph to show the steep hike in cigarette prices since I have been smoking over the last 5 years. I then tallied up all the cigarettes I had smoked and divided them by 20 to get the total amount of packs. This too was shown in bar graph format. Then using the data of the average pricing over the past five years I was able to calculate approximately how much money I had spent on cigarettes during my lifetime. The totals are 25,360 cigarettes smoked, 1,268 packs smoked, and 7,652.90 dollars spent. I titled the graphic The Tobacco Tally, and the included image is a detail from the title. For this part of the piece, I found about 10 photos of smoke. Like putting a puzzle together, I cut out pieces of the images that I could use to create a single smoke wisp that had the illusion of flowing through the letters and reacting to their structures. This technique was a part of the basis for my thesis proposal.

Studio Journal: 24-Hour Narrative

Our first project in Design III was a 24 hour narrative. The goal of the project was to represent some aspect of our life over a span of 24 hours. After much contemplation, I arrived at a solution that satisfied the criteria for the assignment. During a day of design work, I took screen shots of my computer window at specific times that I thought would give an honest representation of the different projects I was working on. I started at 9 in the morning and ended at 9 the next day. At first, I was not going to include breaks or nighttime, but then realized that these variables would actually provide for a much more interesting image. After I had all my screenshots in chronological order, I began to figure out a way to compile them together. There is nothing more linear in the world than time, so I figured a long piece that resembled a timeline seemed like the obvious direction to go. Then I realized I had to take the project a step further and decided not only to depict the projects I was working on during that time, but also to represent my creative flow as I was working on them. In Photoshop I compiled all the screenshots together then began to warp them in a way that I would describe as a heart monitor print-out of my creative flow. During times of high creativity the screenshots bulge out and during times of low creativity they implode. Also, during break time or sleep, my flow is represented by the black form as seen in the included image. The final piece was 200 inches long. For the included image, I chopped it up into 3 sections so that I could fit it onto the blog.