Henry Bernstein SMP: "Gipetto"

This past week I decided to finish my final event blog post and attended Henry Bernstein's SMP titled, "Gipetto". Henry's SMP was an animated show focusing around 4 friends and their reenactment of there previous night by a series of flashbacks.
I feel Henry's SMP was very impressive especially considering the limited amount of time he had to produce his show. Usually TV shows similar to Henry's have multiple people working on one single episode simultaneously. Henry did all of the animation himself using the software iMovie. Being a film major, I can relate to Henry's commitment and effort placed on this SMP. To create a show from scratch with over 30 minutes of animation is quite impressive for a college student.

I feel Henry really has a piece of work that he can be proud of. While there are some minor things that Henry needs to flesh out ( some audio and transitions), I believe if he had more time he could have a real chance at creating a finalized piece of work.

I think the strongest aspect of Henry's SMP is his unique drawling style and characters. The show defiantly has a unique look. It reminds me a lot of South Park; focusing more on the narrative and dialogue of the scenes rather than extremely detailed animations. Additionally his characters are what drives the story. All 4 of the friends bring a unique aspect to the show and create a group thats fun to watch. They all have their individual quirks and flaws and gel together vary well. Besides the funny dialogue exchanged between these friends, my favorite aspect of the show was that all his characters are animals. This was really funny and gives a unique spin on the show allowing viewing to enter a new world where animals are the humans.  Overall, I really liked Henry's SMP and hope he continues to work on creating a finished product to show any potentinal animators/companies in the future.

Here's a link to his show, check it out

Digitial Scholarship: Crag Saper Lecture

Craig Saper is a Professor and Director of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Ph.D Program at UMBC in Baltimore, Maryland. Professor Saper's lecture was titled Digital Scholarship. Digital Scholarship provides information and commentary about digital copyright, scholarly communication, and other digital information and publications open to the public. Saper explained this ideas as an open access library, on the web, that is free to the public. Throughout the lecture Saper explained the difficulties with attempting to creat this digital scholarship in todays digital world. It only seems right that libraries should electronically scan books online and make them open to the public, if we have the technology. Unfortunately, the problem lies with money. If all scholarly books and journals are scanned onto the web and free for everyone, what is the incentive to those writers to produce such documents. Saper, an author himself, has been in this same situation. He believes even though authors should get some money for his work, the main goal of his writing is not for financial gain, but to let others read his work and learn from it. Overall, Saper believes we are heading to a Digital world more faster than you may think. We are shifting from the age of printed material, to the age of electronic material. Digital Scholarship is not against printed books, but apart of it. Saper believes Digital Scholarship gives people a different type of experience. Not only can you read a scanned journal online but you can also hear commentary on that specific journal. This gives another dimension that printed books do not offer. Although he believes digital scholarship is the way of the further, he urges the importance of appreciating the history of printed material and incorporating those ideas into todays digital scholarship. 

Website Artist Blog: Paul Keeley

Paul Keeley, is currently an Associate Creative Director with MRM Worldwide. Keeley is experienced in the digital field having worked 15 years in the industry. MRM Worldwide is known for helping clients build their brands by conceiving and creating programs and platforms to attract, engage, and acquire customers. As Associate Creative Director, Keeley works closely with clients to advertise their products/brands with new and creative web designs. 

I specifically like his own portfolio website. His website is fairly simple, with a basic dark color scheme, but the website is easy to read and navigate. I understand it is important to incorporate some aspects of your artwork into your website, but since my project is geared toward a portfolio website, I'm more focused on making my site easy to navigate, rather than too artistic. 

Besides the color scheme, the widgets/template he uses (near the top) really interests me and is something i plan on incorporating into my portfolio. I feel scrolling can get somewhat monotonous especially if you have a fair amount of information (and loss users attention in your site). Instead Kelley uses a template to separate his information into individual links. ( Facebook, flicker, linked in, resume, contact info). This keeps users interested in his work allowing people to click from link to link through his different social media accounts. 

I hope to use this same idea I'm my portfolio website. I Plan on having an more horizontal website with some general background information about myself and include either a widget/template like Keeleys or incorporate a horizontal scroll or swipe design. Within each template ill include a link to my individual portfolio pieces ( Films, Artwork in class, Photography, Blog, resume, Contact info, ect). 

Get Lost Project

Check out my first crack at HTML… http://students.smcm.edu/nckipke/getlost.html

Final Project #2: The Portrait

Remixed Logo Assignment

Since The Washington Wizards desperately need a new logo, I took it upon myself to remix the logo for this assignment in Abode Illustrator. The hat may need some more work but I'm happy with how the wizard turned out. It gives the team some more intimidation than the older logo. 

Before: 

After: 

Project 2 Progress so far...

A few weeks in and I'm about finished all of Walt's jacket and mask, I still need to touch up on some of the color and shadows but ill come back to that later, now I'm ready to tackle his face and skin 

Original Portrait

Vectored Portrait

Vector Artist Post

TomWhalen is a talented designer and accomplished illustrator from Pennsylvania. Tom has made a career out of illustrating his passions for such things as comic books, poster art, movies, pop art and more. Whalen works from home and creates these illustrations to comic/movie lovers around the world.  He's as passionate about drawing and illustration as he is art and design. Whalen has masterfully fused these two passions in his distinctive poster designs. Here are a few of my favorites:

                         

I really think his style is very original. His posters give off a very unique look different from many vector artists I have seen. His posters usually have very mellow/cool colors and give off a sort of old time/retro look. Whalen believes the 2 most important aesthetics involved in vector art is color and composition. Even though his art is not very detailed, his color and composition help bring his posters to life. I also really enjoy the way he incorporates both word and design into his artwork. After seeing some of his work I hope in the future to attempt something similar to his work and create my own rendition of some of my favorite movie posters. 

Music Sketch

Possible Portrait Images

Line Vector Drawling

Before Illustrator

After Illustrator… Still a work in progress 

Artist Blog #2: Charles Csuri

In Paul Hertz's essay Art, Code, and the Engine of Change, he prefaces his essay stating, " we swim but do not know the meaning of water". Hertz is alluding to the way in which many people take for granted the aestethics behind digital art. Computer technology is so pervasive in our everyday lives it is easy to be oblivious to the ways digital art is created. While it is easy to go on photoshop and play around with the endless effects/filters you can apply to different images, its important to understand where they came from and appreciate how they were made. One pioneer who is known for his tremendous advancements in the medium of computer art is Charles Csuri. 

Charles Csuri is an artist and computer graphics professor at the Ohio State University. Not only an artist, Csuri had been an all american football player at Ohio State as well as serving in WWII. Celebrated as an all american football star, Csuri could have played professionally but instead choose to pursue his love for art. He began to exhibit his painting in NYC from 1955-1965 where he began to gain noterioty. His research activity in computer animation and graphics has received international recognition and acclaim as well as being known as "father of digital art and computer animation" by Smithsonian. 

The artwork above is known as the "Sine Curve Man". This piece was a collaborated work with Csuri and James Schaffer in 1967. During his early years Csuri was interested with the geometric transformations of images and the ways images could be manipulated. The sine curve man was created by superposing many images of a sine curve to create the image of a man. This picture interested me having had to made sine curves on my calculator in many high school math classes. I found it interesting that Csuri's simple sine man was so revolutionary to digital media. The transformation of the sine graph linked the computer together with art and paved the way for other digital artist to drawn from. 

Its funny to think this simple transformation had such an effect on the way we use digital art today.  Csuri innovated the ways in which artists could conceptually manipulate images digitally on a computer. One of the effects which I enjoyed using with in my first project was the warp tool. Taking an arbitrary dull image and applying the warp tool really had a tremendous effect on my work and helped to make my desired effect of a vortex-like shape. Like i said before, its really fun to play around on applications like photopshop and illustrator without even knowing how these options were made. At least now I have more appreciation for these effects and there foundation.  

Final Project #1

Photo Correction Exercise

Original: 

Color Corrected: 

Artist Blog #2

Katriona Beales is a freelance digital artist from London, England. She is not famously known in the industry, but rather a small-scale self employed artist. She manages to stay afloat working with multiple galleries around London through artist educator freelance work as well as commissioned work. I particularly liked her work because of its approach on todays technological world. Karolina explains,    " At the heart of my practice there is tension between fascination and wariness with new technologies… I am intensely excited by the simultaneous nature of display, consumption, and production that these interfaces (types of media) encourage but at he exact same time, I am wary and perhaps even frightened at moments." Beales goes on to say that she does not feel safe knowing that she can be located at any time by the simple GPS facility programmed into her phone. The rapid growth of technology that has been introduced into our everyday lives has conjured recent debate on whether such technologies have been beneficial or harmful? While Katriona believes the pros outweigh the cons, she believes there needs to be an awareness of the ill effects or excess of too much technology in ones life. Most of her artwork deals with this topic and especially the act of viewing such technologies and how our bodies interact with it. Beales most intriguing artworks include "Constant Screen' (2012) and 'Disembodied Gaze' (2013). 

Both of these pieces are 'a reflection on our subjective response to information overload and excess' says Beales. The 'Constant Screen' is specifically a reflection of our interaction with the screen and the viewing experience. The video contains multiple windows playing several differently things. Some show a security cameras recording a certain place while other show eyes peering into those certain places and viewing whats happening. Beales attempts to show that even though technology has the ability to show endless information, (such as a security camera footage from a specific place) the act of viewing this footage has an affect on us physically. The eyes in the video look distracted, and tired almost as if they have been given too much information and cannot process it all. 

Disembodies Gaze  attempts to offer the same type of feeling of reflection and our experience with viewing technology. This piece consists of a single digital photograph which has been manipulated to create hundreds of versions of the same photo. Similar to the way we used text edit to change the text within photos, the image of an eyeball has been manipulated in hundreds of different ways. Alongside a constant loop of these images is an extract describing the act of watching a film in a cinema. Beales work contrast the act of looking at digital technology with the cinematic experience. The detached eye brings attention to the way we experience both digital and filmic world (through the eye). In a unique way it sheds light on how we do this as well as the risk of 'detaching' our eye from technology with too much of it. 

In a way Beales artwork makes her audience step back and take a literal 'look' at what they are doing while working with digital art. In a Brechtian way Beale 'estranges' her audiences and influences them to think outside the box about the process of the art rather than its (face value) or artistry. 

Overall, Beales states, " technological utopias and dystopias exist at once and together ". While she is more pro-technology she doesn't show much bias in her artwork. She understands there are both pro's and con's but allows the viewer to decide what he/she thinks by portraying the way in which we interact with todays technology.  

Scan Collage

My 10 Scans

1. Energy Drink Can

2. Bottle Caps 

3. Deck of Cards

4. CD

5. More CD's

6. iPhone 

7. Skittles 

8. Skittles 

9. Sponge

10. Watch 

24 Hour Tech Log

It seems the more snow days we have at school the more I'm dependent on technology. Here is a log of all the different ways I have used technology today: 

1. My alarm woke me at 9am 
2. I checked my email to see if we had off of school 
3. Set my alarm again 
4. Watched Netflix for 1 hour
5. Checked Facebook multiple times 
6. Listened to music on way to Great Room 
7. Swiped my card in at the Great Room 
8. Messaged friends on Facebook to go get lunch 
9. Watched TV
10. Played PS3 
11. Searched for Music on Youtube 
12. Checked Email again
13. Read a few articles online about the Super Bowl 
14. Used the computers in the Mac Lab to type this 
15. Finished the day with more Netflix 

The scary thing is that I was actually without my iPhone for the whole day; I had misplaced my phone charger the night before. This project goes to show you how much we use technology in our everyday lives.  

Artist Blog #1: Oliver Wasow

Olvier Wasow is an artist working with photography and other related media. He has been in reviewed in numerous publications and is currently a teacher at the School of Visual Arts at NYU. 

Oliver Wasow is an artist known for his manipulation. Wasow’s body of work shows his unique talent to create unknown and surreal landscapes through computer manipulations and real life photography.  The combination of both real/actual landscapes alongside digitally manipulated images is what makes his work so interesting. While viewing his artwork, it’s difficult to know whether these places are fantasies or reality. Wasow’s landscapes suggest an “otherworldliness”, while at the same time a believable reality that may exist in an unknown place. Although they incorporate ‘real’ and ‘artificial’ images, they are almost seamless, creating a unique spin on art in the digital age. 

The strongest aspect of Wasow’s work is how unified his images are. The conflict with constructing such pictures is its continuity within the photograph. I think the reason I like his artwork so much is that I can identity what images in the photo are faked and which are real, yet at the same time they seem like they could exist. I believe with Christiania Paul’s interpretation stating, “ Wasow’s landscapes are neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’, depicting a stylized or dramatic, painterly view while maintaining basic spatial and temporal referents to create a seemless, unified image”. Spacing is an important component of Wasow’s artwork especially when fusing real life and digital images in such a unique and unified way.