I’m exploring the re-association of words and meaning. How even the most subtle shifts in a passage can radically alter its apparent content. The visual representation of the text shows the relationships between ideas and game mechanics drives the interaction between audience and transitory content. Through indirect control of the tumblers populated with synonyms of the five seed words, a number of interpretations can be made. The lack of a physical artifact also plays into the piece. Offering the audience an experience rather than a traditional aesthetic “thing”.
The experiment was created using the JAVA based computer language called Processing. (processing.org)
(I seem unable to upload the video to this blog, so here is the Utube link, I’ve added a beginning and end, and some tweaks to what you saw last Monday)
The wind blows through the doors of my heart. By Deborah Digges
After some searching for a final project idea, I decided to continue the theme of wind, but explore beyond the windmill subject. Combining the topic of wind with a recent rediscovery of poetry, and new technical skills in video making produced this short verse of animated poetry.
Initially, words represent the message and thoughts of the poet. Letterpress created a personal connection with these words and ideas. Then, when cut, combined, and repeated and modified, the phrases echo the physical actions described by the words. This poem included rich visual material that was easily represented by opening and closing doors, fluttering butterflies, and tearing paper. The element of time is represented by the stop motion video; it captures the effects of the wind in its various forms: as penetrator, as mild annoyance, as liberator, and finally as destructor. Developing my new passion for motion-graphics (!), titles, image manipulation, sound, and transitions aid in creating the mood and flow. Only the first third of the poem is included, as time became not only a conceptual element, but also a physical limitation.
Throughout the project process, I combined hand and digital elements. Beginning with an internet search for poems about “wind”, I then hand-sketched storyboards, and had direct contact with type and paper. Beginning the movie sketches with digital photography combined with physical manipulation of text and paper imbedded the tangible nature of materials within a digital format. The notion of repeating an image to represent time seemed so simple on the surface, but I found that rhythm, repetition and tone increased the complexity and gave the text an almost voice-like quality.
I plan to continue this project, either by animating the rest of this poem, or exploring how visual motion and text can interact to form a complex experience, different from either the written or spoken word.
My intent for this project is to challenge perceptions and behaviors. Perceptions of the technology we use, other available technologies, and the behaviors associated with them.
1. That burning fossil fuels at any mpg is an unacceptable long-term solution.
2. That zero emissions are unobtainable.
3. That alternative technologies are poor substitutes for gas.
4. That individual consumer behavior does not affect the global problem.
I chose to work with readily available software to make the work accessible – and to show that the most prevalent technology is not necessarily the best. And it worked. A format that should work across multiple platforms – initially failed – and much like the technology it criticizes, required conversion and optimization to work at all.
The attached pdf contains more information on the individual works, background, and how it would be exhibited.
I’m calling my second book “the Death of Things,” as it deals with the death of things that seemingly aren’t able to die, i.e. air, water, earth, etc. As we discussed at James’ home, I was interested in representing the time at which something is dying, assuming that that last moment of life lasts indefinitely, which is counter to my own concept of death. I suppose it plays into some people view of purgatory. As I wanted to focus on the the imagery, and not describing the moment, James suggested I look to someone who’s masterful grasp of language would do that work for me. In this case, I have chosen an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding” one of the “Four Quartets”. Incidentally, I would suggest reading this to all of you, it is not difficult to read and the imagery is very effective, not all of it so dark as the portion I have chosen.
In the first stanza, which discusses the death of air, I have chosen images that I captured of a burning match, something that takes a matter of seconds. This part of the poem talks about ash, burning and dust suspended in the air, like smoke. It also alludes to the burning of a house, which I use later in the book.
The second stanza deals with the death of earth. I used a young women smoking as she ages to represent some of the ideas in this section. For instance, the flood and drought flowing over the eyes and mouth seemed similar to smoke flowing out of the mouth and over the eyes as a smoker exhaling, I have in this case chosen to represent the earth as the face of a woman aging. Another line, “the parched eviscerate soil…” refers to the womans aging face as well.
The last stanza discusses the death of water and fire, and to represent these concepts I chose to use photographs from fires that I myself helped fight. The last image is of family pictures hung on the wall that have survived a fire, that I feel signify the battle between the built environment and the eroding forces of fire and water. Unintentionally, the last section of the book has a lot of “noise,” ink that found it’s way through a poorly coated screen. This noise further adds to the idea of decay towards the end of the book.
I also noticed that the images I had chosen tell another story though the book. The lighting of a match, dying with a cigarette and subsequent housefire are a common cause of fire.
…One day as I went to Youghal by the sea…
by Rich Yates
Prototype piece of interactive memory montage.
Clear plastic sheets attached with nuts and bolts to a sheet of Plexiglas.
CMYK Color separations and white masks printed onto plastic sheets.
Best viewed on a light table or a white background.
This is an interactive photo montage of my memories of the town of Youghal in County Cork, Ireland. This artifact is intended to show how some memories are clearer than others and how they often overlap or fade with time.
Viewers of this piece are encouraged to explore the make up of my photo montage. Manipulate my representation, change the order of my memories causing some to be clearer and others to be fade or to disappear altogether or become peripheral memories. Along with changing the order or presence of the images a viewer of this piece can also explore the colors making up the different images by removing or including different print colors thus changing the tone of the memories making them somewhat surreal. Viewers are encouraged to do all of these manipulations and to leave behind a composition of their own for the next viewer, thus temporarily communicating their own representation to others.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I’ve been fascinated by the concept of non-linear time, and how the universe seems cyclical, since I was a kid growing up on Doctor Who. This project being my first video attempt I don’t know how well I articulated the cyclical and unchanging nature of time. I started out with a large amount of images taken with two cameras of not only typical seasonal imagery but people and objects as well. I was intending to connect one image to the next in both a linear and a non-linear order, hoping to reveal the inherent energies that an object or space absorbs over time, and use color to display this. I narrowed it down to 138 photographs I have taken, most of them recently with this project in mind, and manipulated them to create more overall cohesion. I wanted the colors to flow from one season to the next. I placed an image representing dawn about every four spaces or so, and an image representing nightfall at equal intervals as well. I incorporated the photos of letterpress blocks that I took at the start of the semester to create some juxtaposition with the imagery – quiet heaven, hollow beauty, sacred joker. I spaced each word out the way I did to create more sentence separation and allow each word to somewhat exist on its own as well
I am glad a sense of emotion is conveyed to the viewer. There are equal parts winter, fall, summer and spring but I also feel that the coldness and darkness of winter is dominating. I am interested to see if watched again in summer if my video evokes a more serene and sunny feeling. The images are all timed differently and set to the music, so some are intended to be viewed slightly longer than others, which may have something to do with the emotion felt, as well. The order of the seasons is the same: winter, fall, summer, spring, but opening and ending with winter to show that everything is a cycle may leave the viewer feeling that winter is most dominant.
To address time in my final project, I knew that I wanted to incorporate moving imagery with stop motion animation somehow. To me, this was the most logical way for me to tackle the subject, but it also seemed to be the most literal. That said, I want the subject explored to be time-related in content. The resulting movie addresses the relationship between time passing in terms of my day-to-day objects and activities and in terms of the pace of the natural world from the human perspective.
Through choice of materials, imagery and audio, my representation of these occurrences attempts to serve as a reminder that while I stay busy in my daily life, there is an unquantifiable amount of natural events unfolding. Recognizing the difference in the pace of these events is one idea I’m trying to communicate: everyday events happen so fleetingly compared to plants growing or the formation of rock, for example. However, wind blowing or a stream flowing can move as quickly, or faster (!) than me doing the dishes. By their movement (or lack of), the objects and images that star in the movie represent a playful interpretation of the extremities of sense of time.
One final thought – since nature just happens through time, I like to think about the objects of my everyday life ‘just happening.’ What do they do all day when I’m not at home? As the movie suggests, the dishes wash-up by themselves, my sweaters come out and roll around, the couch makes sculptures, projects create themselves, and my rock and shell collections perform dances for the rest of the apartment. Fun!
G. Mauricio Mejía. University of Minnesota – Universidad de Caldas
Passive toxins is an interactive object that explores the contemporary relationship between food and us. Eating is for many of us a pleasing activity. However, as we become aware of the food we are eating, we realize that some toxins are entering in our body. The speed of the damage is slow and hidden by pleasure. We might want to change this but the system does not allow much change. The imagery used is chalk-paint graffiti made by the author. Manipulations of reverse time, saturation and brightness are applied to support the visual rhetoric.
Memory, sentiment, emotion — many feelings can be conveyed more eloquently with an image than through the written word. Even though words can have several meanings or be used in multiple contexts, they tend to be specific. An image can tell a unique story each time it is viewed, even when viewed by the same person several times. Words are individual symbols for language whereas a picture is an entire story.
With this in mind I used the poppy field image I had worked on all semester and combined it with a few photos from a 19th century prairie town in southwestern Minnesota. I chose an evocative track from Andrew Bird to pull the piece together. All of the pieces have a personal resonance for me and my own story, so it became very satisfying to see it all come together, despite my novice-level Flash skills.
I was fortunate to come across these wonderful photos through a friend of mine. They were taken by Rev. John Gmeiner, a priest in southwestern Minnesota at the turn of the last century. Gmeiner documented daily life in his parish with a large format view camera using glass negatives. He photographed with the empathy of someone who knew his subjects well — a boy with a half-eaten cookie, a gang of girls whirling in a circle on the school playground, an unhappy little girl, then the same girl with her mother (but still not happy). These are just a very few of the everyday scenes and stories he captured of the life in that little town on the prairie. Adding these images to my hand-hewn prints made more sense than a dancing lady and was more personal.
I created the flexagons as a “souvenir” piece partly because I love how they work (especially with a hidden “bonus track”) and also because they are a nice complement to my set of prints. Here’s a guide to the folding/unfolding process to see the sixth side after you get to the fourth side (with lots of text). —Nance
Bison Bison is a continuation of my second project, exploring both time and the exchange of information between two things… but this time taking the form of a concertina book prototype. It’s a prototype in terms of ink and paper, but I also see opportunities for further collage/image exploration.
All images were captured from motion, either video stills or by moving an object across a scanner while its being scanned. The images were then taken into Photoshop, and CMYK channels split into four grayscale files each. From here, I selected one channel to bring into the collages and colorize in InDesign as monotones.
The concept of audience/spectator as part of an image’s interpretation/meaning heavily influences this project. Here, bison are combined in the character of Rorschach ink blot tests—the viewer sees what he/she wants to or is looking for. The bison themselves begin to take on an abstract fuzziness. The concertina book format mimics a landscape, and time is explored both in generating the images as well as paging through the book.
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