Final Project Reflections

I have ran this project threw quite a number of different stages, each can be atributred to one thing or another and im not actually close to completion of the project as of this writing. However as it stands, this is the evolution of my final.

I love working in Flash, the program is intuitive and with a little of know how can do amazing things. I haven’t done anything major with flash sense freshman year of college and as such have had an itching to stretch my ability’s within it once again. The possibilities for interactive or at least user manipulable art work is always on my mind and this projects open state gave me the opportunity to attempt once more an interactive art work.

The inical design was to play off of my previous project Altered States in which threw manipulation of time codes and layering I had produced a dreadfully eary peace from a single source. However as I contemplated the work further over time I realized that I wanted to produce something a little less conceptually heavy and more visually interesting. As such I dumped the idea of layering effects in favor of a simpler layer structure to produce images at seemingly random times when scrolling over the files pallet of information. However once completing the alpha build of the project I realized that this was far to distant of a goal to complete in a weeks’ time due to complications of data placement and the requirement for appropriated source materials. As such where I’m at now I have cut out the myriad of seemingly random images and space in favor of producing a work far more similar to Bruce’s Nature Feel in which I generate a landscape/image form many divergent sources. However in keeping with my original idea, I decided that it would be best to attempt to produce a seemingly 3 dimensional image through much of the same methods I had previously intended for randomizing my pallet. I am currently working on still foraging all of the needed source materials as their requirements for this project are quite irregular for most photographers. Whole subjects are not in fashion in photography and painting, but is necessary for achieving a convincing effect here.

For now I can leave you with the alpha build form Friday.

Draw-a-thon #1

Title: Draw-a-thon #1
Date: 11/10/2012
Duration: 12 Hours, 30 minutes
Medium: Digital Performance
Materials: Photoshop, Live Stream (video & Text Chat), Team Speak (Voice Chat), Wacom Intuos 5 Medium

Draw-a-thon #1 was conceived as a means of bringing people from around the world to a single place and to give influence to the artists art work. it explores the possibility, limitations, and results of mediated communication (text & voice chat) of media (art) in media (internet video feed). the produced art during the artworks progress are my interpretations of the viewers requests and interactions during its production.

(waiting for new image)

Taking the Media out of the Social

Moving my project to a time before the internet would be quite feasible assuming it wasn’t illegal somewhere. If you have ever been to a city you’ve probably seen people on the streets doing exactly what I was doing. Street performers are social artists in a sense. They work directly with their audience, are influenced by the audience and in some cases make a living from it.

For my specific work, live broadcast of art as it’s created and the subjects are chosen by the viewers. The only real major difference would be the medium and the location. Instead of working digitally on a tablet and Photoshop, it would be a pencil and paper. Instead of from the comfort of our homes and a cozy chair, it would be on the side of a street, perhaps at a park or in a café. I feel that once I get past my personal issues with drawing in public. Working physically close to my viewers and contributors would be a far more enjoyable experience for the both of us, as I would be working on paper (a medium in better with) and my viewers/contributors would be able to have far greater input, not to mention an eraser time chatting.

One large difference though would come with the resulting images form the encounter. When you are physically near someone and they request something, it is naturally expected for the drawing to be gifted to them at its completion. While that is nothing I’m against, it would make it harder to document the event and anything that was created I would no longer poses at the end of it.

Aaron Koblin

Name: Aaron Koblin

Birth: 1/14/1982

Education: MFA from UCLA Design Media Arts

Current Local: San Francisco, California

Medium: Digital Data Visualization and Crowd sourcing

Social Networks: Twitter, Google+

Job: Google Data Arts

“Aaron's work takes real-world and community generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and the systems they

create.” Aaronkoblin.com

Comments:

Aaron is a genius of both programing and social aggregation capable of visualizing and coordinating thousands to millions of data points and individuals in to his art. his exploration of off ton forgotten about ideas with in the art community is audacious and extremely well executed. his ability's are amazing and his acuteness to the history of computing is admirable. frankly from where i sit it seems as though his dedication to the process threw computing is greater than to that of art esthetic. I'm not sure how but i keep on getting amazing artists out of these random drawings we do.

Not Another Social Distraction!

So for a new assignment out of my Advanced New Media class I had to obtain a twitter account, either using a preexisting one or to make one. As I lack a twitter account and have never had any interests in one, I had to make an account for the asinment. (which includes righting this blog entry)

Registration…

So I made my way to the site, bumping threw Google for a correct url. (funny I misspelled twitter my first try) and noticed on the very first line for the registration a request for a name, specifically first and last. Unlike most from my generation I entered the net in the days where giving out your real name was considered as bad as inviting a rapist in to your house. Because of this my first instinct was “F**K no I’m not giving you that” and promptly closed the tab. However because this is a mandatory thing I quickly found myself back on the account registration page and staring down the name requirement. This time I defaulted to my primary false identity, which will not be named, and filled out the forum only to be greeted with a “this username is already taken!” message when I entered in what once was my unique gamer handle.

I find it quite depressing the number of people that are now running about the net using my screen name, thanks to them I’ve had to use generalizations for my Minecraft account, several other services, and now possibly twitter. The worst part of all, the handle that I wanted was consumed by an account that has been in active for 3 years… If you can’t tell, I’m not huge on people, especially ones who take what was once my unique usernames. I had an identity behind them, if you saw that name, you knew who to expect. Now it could be any number of bosos on the net.

Ultimately after an elongated period of fiddling with what handles it did permit and how it registered them (caps, no caps) I originally decided to just play it easy and go with my 2^nd most prominent gamer tag (3rd most used username) Aostai. Officially that name has a ser. section, Iwef, however I have been fazing it out as it is both illogical and unnecessary. However I generally shy away from using this one due to its irregularity between spelling and pronunciation due to its origin in Star Wars. (a-stoya) after much thought regarding this I decided to go with the surname of my primary gamer tag Pasow Atheba.

The decision to finally move to something I’ve never used before is twofold. I’ve been looking for a while now for a new online identity as my old ones have gained some unnecessary stigmas while still giving some homage to my past. Atheba has sense its creation become the dominant last name for all new characters I’ve made in games and is one of the more phonetically spelled of them. I really wish I knew where I was going with building an identity, I’m not huge on letting everyone know the one given to me, and I’m not huge on the ones I’ve used thought my life. I was fine with just rolling with old ones till they started vanishing from availability.

After registration…

Why the hell do I have to follow 5 people the moment I make the account?

*enter minor amounts of rage*

Decided to see if I could just get back to regular twitter by loading another page and surly enough I was back to a normal service. What I’ve been questioning the entire time I’ve made this account was what was available to change after creation. I was quite paranoid that I would be locked in to everything once creating the account; however to my delight I can change everything, the Name, the username/handle. While I was there I also uploaded one of the avatars I’ve been using lately around the net. My next step was to disable 90% of its social functions, took out nearly all of its email notifications, shut down its privacy violation system of tailoring twitter based on sites I visit (hoping it turns off the cookie tracking) and forced on a few features that really should be on by default.

Lastly before posting this blog entry, I tweeted that the account had been created, a little tradition of every account I’ve ever made.

@Athebaart

Appropriation Study

Title: Altered States
Year: 2012
Run Time: 5:37
Medium: Digital Video
Original Footage: The Nature of Sound
Description: In Altered States, i look in to what kind of abstracted meanings and imagery can be derived from old black and white footage threw heavy manipulation of the image and audio.

Video:

Stills:

Collage: Digital vs. Traditional

I feel that I create to extremely different ends when collaging digitally verses traditionally. Digitally I’m very heavy on the visual esthetic of the image, normally playing with error and other corruption based manipulation techniques. (I have a little series I keep called degradation) while traditional media I tend to work to some specific end, where there is some story or reason to what is created. Simply put, digitally I’m working towards a more dada and modernism look and feel (its shapes relationships and colors), verses traditional is more story driven, where what it means is more important than what it looks like.

Despite this there are some similarities in how I work. Both digital and traditional means of collaging are products of the process. While I may have an idea of what I want to do, the end result is highly dependent on what unexpected discoveries are made when working towards that desire. (I am a huge fan of glitches in things, they reveal so much about how things work)

Specifically to the appropriation assignment that this entry is a derivative of, I found it rather difficult getting started. I’m used to having a plethora of media sources on hand or easily accessible. With the advent of the internet we have limitless supply of sources, so if we ever ended up wanting a new one or more it was only a click away. However for this assignment the limitation of the singular source video, particularly one that’s as old as my grandparents, was quite limiting. (Copyright law makes it imposable to get stuff that is newer legally I’m assuming) Thankfully I did get some ideas after a bit of time that were all derivations of other collaging techniques I’ve seen across the internet. However, untimely what has resulted in the finale form of the project is far from anything I had originally conceived.