This is my final project for digital art at Metro State college of Denver. My intention was more process oriented than the animation itself. I encountered many challenges when creating this video, but the outcome turned out all right. The piece is based on the whiteboard art movement popularized by a recient UPS ad campaign. I hope you enjoy the end result.
Here we have an assemblage website created in dreamweaver. What I was trying to play on here was a sense of play. Our group chose a childrens motif, and each of us chose a theme. I decided to create a play land. A lot of the gifs are links to internet games and coloring sites that a child might like to spend some time playing. The landscape is a surreal world composed of fruits and vegetables. All gifs are cartoon characters a child might enjoy. Although fun and playful I don’t view it as a very successful website I have links leading away from my page, but there is nothing really drawing the viewer back to the initial starting point that is my website. Some of the more successful pages in our class were ones that had multiple links and layers all leading back to the initial starting page. This was a good learning experience for me. I really found what I might like to do in the future, and most importantly what not to do when making a website.
View a previous post now in video format. Just click on the image and the computer will do the rest.
Digital Art by Christiane Paul is three chapters long. Each chapter ranging anywhere from sixty to one hundred pages long. It becomes rather daunting task to attempt to read this book or even a chapter in just a couple sittings. I almost view this book as a work of art created to evoke feelings of exactly what the author went through to compile all of the information she needed to create a book on this subject. The world of digital art seems never ending and when constantly evolving becomes extremely hard to grasp. My response to the third chapter considering Themes in Digital Art is that it definitely could have been broken up into many segments in order to focus the reader. This is a testament to the author for creating such a seamless flow from one subject to the next, but the subjects themselves become lost in a conglomerate of millions of words. In the end, though very hard to grasp at times, not all was lost.
Paul describes each subject very well and seems to touch on all aspects of each subject even when they incorporate multiple different themes in digital art at one time. Perhaps this is why she chose not to break up the chapter at all. I found my mind drifting in this chapter to a world that incorporates all three subjects and is o interactive it consumes the viewer. That world is called second life.
In second life a viewer can choose an avitar (or character) to define their presence in this world very similar to our own. Avitars can be happy, sad, hungry, tired, lazy, or energetic much the same that you and I can be. They live in world based on economic value, and physical money actually changes hands in this world. I read a story that a woman made over a million dollars buying and selling real estate in this virtual world. I also heard about a lady who quit her full time career because she was making more money selling virtual hair styles than she was in the real world. There are some benefits to a world like this. Buildings can be built to scale and characters can walk around and interact within them. Real world companies are buying virtual real estate and constructing new buildings as an interactive test model to see how well their ideas of buildings or machines would function in the real world.
Paul describes artificial life, artificial intelligence, telepresence, and identity to name a few. All themes discussed in this chapter seem to come to life (no pun intended) in this virtual world. Aside from the robotics this world has it all, and I will run for the hills if someone decides to incorporate real world robotics into the mix. When I was reading this chapter I started to notice the line between reality and virtual reality was beginning to blur. Five years after the book was written that line has become increasingly blurrier. My only question is how far can we take this before the digital mimics reality so well it hurts?
Chapter 2 in Christian Paul’s Digital Art attempts to define digital technologies as a medium. She begins by pointing out some features of digital technologies such as interactive, participatory, dynamic, and customizable. Digital technologies are unique considering a viewer can become completely immersed in them. Consider a website depicting a whole other world.
With the use of a mouse as an extension of the viewer’s hand one has the capacity to guide their own way through this interactive world. They could click on links viewed as portals to even more elaborate worlds. They could guide another character to eat a virtual apple, or hop in a virtual car and drive into the sunset. The possibilities are limitless to what the imagination can produce. Though that statement is true I have found that even at this very moment I am limited to technologies that someone else has created, and the general public rests with me on this one. If we all knew how to write our own code the possibilities would then truly be limitless as to what we could produce. Some truly remarkable pieces have been created under the digital realm that really require a physical interaction by the viewer. The pieces that come to mind were both created by Jeffrey Shaw. 
This piece is called Legible City in which Jeffrey took actual landscapes of cities and replaced the buildings with words that the viewer can physically cycle by. 
The other is one of a golden cow created within a 3D virtual landscape mimicking the real world landscape of the particular room within this art piece resides. 
The viewer can actually walk around this virtual three dimensional cow and view how the rest of the room reflects off of the shiny surface of this golden cow. The cow itself is displayed on a monitor and as this monitor moves so does the view of the golden cow with it. I think the virtual reality aspect of digital technologies is one of their most exciting features, and I really appreciate the physical interaction within virtual worlds the most. Even though Paul mentions interactivity as one distinguishing feature of digital technologies, she also argues being interactive has become meaningless when you consider all art is interactive. Even a painting on a wall becomes interactive when transformed within a viewers mind. The degree to which digital technology can become interactive is what truly makes that feature such a defining characteristic. She goes on to describe some forms of digital art from installation to virtual reality and musical environments. I found the lines between these forms of digital art to be really blurry and undefined. There is such a drive to incorporate many aspects of digital art into one piece, and the capacity to do such a thing is ever present. By the click of a mouse a video can be incorporated within a still life in a matter of seconds. My point is that digital technology is changing so fast and is constantly new that it becomes unreasonable all together to even try to define. The book by Christiane Paul was published in 2003. From the time the book was written to the time it was published and out in stores it was already obsolete. The fact remains that our definition doesn’t matter, and all that is left for us to do is play.
I was asked to post a blog about gifs. In particular I had a question about how to make gifs. For those of you who don’t know what a gif is they are defined as a graphic interchange format. In layman’s terms they are basically a series of layers with basic differences. When these slides (or layers) are placed back to back on a time line they can be flashed at a rapid rate to create an animation similar to those flip books you used to play with when you were a kid. I figured rather than do something that was already layed out for me I would just set up some links that break down the process of gif creation using photoshop.
The world that I play in is extremely colorful and playful in its own right. I have taken images from around my house and altered them with the paint bucket tool in photoshop creating paint by numbers images that (to me) really convey a sense of playfulness that I experience on a daily basis within my living space. See for yourselves.
All We Have is Lost
This project started out as an environmental issue based upon the popular chant drill baby drill. As the project progressed drill baby drill went from an environmental issue to more of a political issue. It was Ansel Adams who said, “It’s a shame we have to fight our government to save the environment.” Growing up within an (imperfect) democratic political system the government has a lot of power over us, but their underlying reason for the things that they do is all based on the popular opinion of the people.
Digital art has come a long way from a toilet hanging on a wall. In Digital Art Christiane Paul takes the reader on a journey from the Dadaist movement were art was stripped from all conventional matters that were defining art at the time, and the question of what is art was placed at the forefront of that art movement(Wikipedia, Dada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism) 11 Sept 2008. Marcel Duchamp became the poster child of this art movement when he placed a toilet on the wall of a museum, wrote a name on it and called it art. This was more a way for him to thumb his nose at the prominent art critics of that time, yet the critics loved it. They thought this toilet on a wall was such an amazing statement of what art is. Anything can be considered art from a toilet on a wall to the chair you are sitting on.
Christiane Paul considers this art movement to be one of the roots of digital art today. She used Duchamp as an example not because of a toilet on a wall, but more for his use of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with his mustache and goatee alteration, and later on when he created more interactive art pieces such as Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics in Motion). Now, this art movement began during WWI in Zurich Switzerland, and Rotary Glass Plates was created in 1920, long before computers were ever created(Wikipedia, Fluxus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus),9 Sept 2008. Christiane Paul uses this movement as an example of were the art world was heading in the early 1900’s to present day. She transcends from the Dadaist movement into the Fluxus art movement when the use of multiple art mediums where combined to make a single piece of art(Wikipedia, Fluxus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus),9 Sept 2008. It’s really amazing how computers went from a giant calculator that took up an entire room of a university to what we have today in labs all around the world. 
Paul takes us from the first notion of a computer as a Memex which consisted of desk with translucent screens which were used to browse documents, to an ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) that extremely large calculator I mentioned(Christian Paul, Digital Art (Thames& Hudson World of Art 2003),9. She follows the growth from a calculator to a UNIVAC the worlds first commercially distributed digital computer that could tackle numeric functions as well as text(Christiane Paul, Digital Art (Thames & Hudson World of Art 2003),9. The military took over the progression of the digital age at this time when they combined multiple computers together in a network with no real centralized location(Christiane Paul, Digital Art (Thames & Hudson WOrld of Art 2003),10. This allowed United States intelligence to accumulate and transfer documents through out this network without the threat of having a nuclear attack diminish our intelligence through out the very real threat of this happening during the Cold War. This network was known as ARPANET an acronym developed out of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is the root of what we know today as the World Wide Web.
When the World Wide Web was developed in the 1990’s computers were pretty prominent in plenty of wealthier households and Universities throughout the world(Christiane Paul, Digital Art (Thames & Hudson World of Art 2003),10. Computer technology was quickly developing into a solid basis for use as an art medium at this time. In the 70’s experiments in the art world were being conducted with television and analog tape technology, but in the 90’s computer technology jumped into a world of common use among the general public. It is no longer uncommon for Joe Shmoe to produce a beautiful work of art morphing digital pictures into a collage, or using plants and twisting them to create pretzel like images. One of the first ways digital imagery was utilized was through face recognition technology and age simulation. The picture above is of Bernardo Provenzano the Godfather of the Cosa Nostra mob family. Age simulation was used to catch illusive criminals who had been alluding law enforcement for years. Today these technologies are used much in the same way, yet now-a-days we can simulate images of a toilet floating in space, and call it art, or place our wonderful president and first lady as the subjects of American Gothic. Eat your heart out Duchamp.
References:
Paul,Christiane, Digital Art (Thames & Hudson World of Art 2003)
Wikipedia, Dada http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism, 11 Sept. 2008
Wikipedia, Fluxus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus, 9 Sept. 2008
A successful ad is something that attracts the viewer, captures their interest, and conveys a message to the viewer. Ads can be utilized to inform, sell, direct, engage, and entice a viewer to do any number of things. Success is measured by how well an ad accomplished the task at hand. Did the ad increase the sales of a particular item? Did the ad inform its viewers on a certain topic? Did the ad direct it’s viewers toward a certain website? Ads that engage the viewer, raise questions, and entice a viewer to act I believe become the most successful, and sometimes it doesn’t take much to accomplish these tasks, sometimes just a good image and a couple of words is all it takes.
The ad that I chose to present is the million dollar homepage. This is a large banner add who’s area covers a million pixels. The viewer becomes particularly engaged with this type of advertisement when they direct their mouse over the large colorful box. The box itself is actually hundreds of different banner ads that will direct the viewer to any number of places over the Internet. The whole point of the ad space was to make one man a million dollars. That man is Alex Tew. He decided to sell pixels of space for a dollar each. In the million dollar homepage he sectioned of 10,000 squares of 100 pixels each and sold squares for a hundred dollars a piece. The meaning behind this ad (other than money in the bank) is as a directory page for hundreds of different websites.
The colors used were all chosen by the people who chose spaces within. The resulting effect is a large coolage of images of all types. The information flows with the swipe of a mouse across the picture plane. It is really hard to figure out how you are visually led through this one. I would say just let the mouse do the talking.
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