Bill Talent
A man who was able to create programs for a device that had not even been released yet, Bill Talent exceeded my expectations as an Apple application designer. I expected Talent to be a young man, at the very least in his late 20’s but I was very surprised when I found out that he was actually quite elderly. Nothing wrong with it, it was just my own prejudices slapping me in the face. For one man to create iPad applications for USA Today, River Murdock, and CNN is a feat in its own right. However for Talent it was not enough. To ease his customers, and fill his pockets with a little more cash, he also allowing his own offices to support the services on his own networks. This allowed the major companies to go on with their issues so any users of the iPad version with issues would address Talent’s offices instead. Very smart and he kept his customers happy, a win, win situation. Talent said that designers have to always understand the expectations and the wants of the customers in order to create a product that is the best of its class. The detail that he goes for his digital applications is indeed great. The way people could read what they want is digital, but it handles like paper, i.e. digital paper that one must still flip by hand. Talent states that the smallest details are given to the designs to allow for more comfort when one is moving from paper to digital, and that is especially true for the older crowds. Throughout his entire presentation I saw a confidence that I rarely see in most of the presenters that I have gone to. I find it especially commendable considering that he is a man one would consider out of place in the technological industry for obvious reasons. However Talent goes above and beyond to show no matter whom you are or how old, you always have something to teach to someone, and something to prove that you can do.
Jeremy Stern
When one thinks of a place, they think of something familiar. A favorite spot at your local diner. A room in your home that is safe and comforting. In the arms of a loved one, feeling as though nothing can harm you. That’s what I think of when I think of place. Space is another item entirely. Space is something that I do not know. Unexplored territory that has the potential of becoming a place if I give it the chance. Jeremy Stern and his piece “Following” was that exact definition between place and space. It was not until I listened to his presentation that I finally understood that the black on the walls was also part of the exhibition; previously I thought it was separate. The black on the walls marked free space on the walls that had not been used by anything, while the white spaces on the walls represented the holes and marks left by previous exhibitions. A sort of timeline that guided one through the history of the gallery. The gallery was a place for many, used to house their artwork and to expose the many talented artists throughout the history of the building. The second part of the exhibition was a series of sounds from Reno that Stern recorded on his own and used Eyecon to play it when people stepped into the right section that triggered it. Using an old Reno map, Stern took his recordings throughout Reno and mapped them out with Eyecon. So not only did one walk through the gallery’s history, but also through Reno itself. With the help of Clint, Stern adjusted the Eyecon program to sound louder as there was less movement. So my previous complaint of not being able to hear other items other than cars could have easily been solved had I just stood still. It opened my mind to remember to give art pieces another look before I make further judgments. A lovely explanation that opened my eyes and allowed me to have a deeper meaning to a previous piece that I had not.
Leo Villareal — Animating Light
Stepping into the exhibition I thought that I was going to be bombarded with blinding strobe lights and illuminating annoyances that one would only enjoy when at a rave. Instead I was welcomed with a wonderfully soft glow. With so many different colors and shapes throughout the exhibition that I felt as though I was walking in a dream. While a few were flashing, it was easy enough for me to ignore those and look at the other pieces within the gallery. As I have yet to play with any Arduino circuit boards, and failing to even light anything up with a traditional bread board, I could not even fathom the difficulty that Villareal went through setting up the entire gallery. From the possibility of short wires, to the chance that a bulb might burn out, the dedication it must have taken to make sure that everything was perfect is probably far greater that anything I have yet to experience. So to Villareal I give my congratulations on even achieving such a feat. Everyone watching was looking at the lights as a moth does to the flame. I myself was guilty of just standing there as the lights danced for my eyes to see. However, while the larger the light the more people there were, I found myself really intrigued with the piece “Big Bang.” As a lover of orbital space I was blown away when I saw what resembled, to me, a galaxy in motion. There is something that I found just so hypnotic about the piece that I found myself staring at it for a good ten minutes before my eyes began to hurt from the exposure. I would not call Leo Villarela’s “Animating Light” animated in the way that one might think of when they see a cartoon. The lights were more alive than anything and made me question if one day we will not see machines talk with them. All in all a wonderful exhibition that made me wish I could install it in my own home.
--VMS
Thursday, May 5, 2011
//Art 343 Shadowcourse
Originally I was going to paint designs on the small shapes and the like, but as I was placing the finished pieces together on the stage the sun was shining in my room and it created wonderful shadows that gave the stage even more designs. From then I decided that I wanted to use the shapes of the polygons that I created to make the stage, not the paints that I was going to use. To give the stage that extra kick, and to give even more shadows, I used a texture spray-paint to give the whole piece more dimension. The pieces were arranged in a spiral from the "starting point" to the hole, calling a bit to the whole space theme. For me, space is not only beautiful; it also presents emptiness to me. A planet is not empty, but a planet may be something to someone. When out in space there is nothing, not even sound.
--VMS
--VMS
//Art 350 Zodiac Horror
After the disaster with the spiders, I decided to go with a more Eyecon approach to my final project. For this project I took 16 sound clips from some of the most iconic horror films and I placed them in accordance to the Zodiac, inspired by the Zodiac Killer. There are 16 trigger areas in Eyecon, 12 for the Zodiac, and 4 for the Zodiac Killer's symbol. Each area also contains the opposite zodiac clips, making every area have 4-5 sound clips, some which repeat. All of the clips appear randomly and continue where they leave off. I set up the entire project in an elevator, and I used red tissue paper to give the entire area an eerie red glow. The local art gallery was kind enough to lend me a small box so I could hide my laptop and sound equipment within the elevator, and it gave a more mysterious quality which I loved.
--VMS
--VMS
//Art 343 Mushroom
This mushroom was quite a lot more difficult to deal with than the mask. The multiple curves almost made me go mental from the difficulty curve, but nevertheless it turned out really well in the end.
--VMS
--VMS
//Art 343 Jeremy Stern, Kevin Hand, Joseph Delappe
Following
Having a bit of knowledge about Eyecon and its workings I had a small idea of what I was walking into when I went to see Jeremy Stern's piece Following. A recreation of sorts of the areas around us, Stern drowve all over and recorded his travels, not with commentary, but with the natural sounds that he encountered. In that way they created the commentary of what was where. To me "natural sounds" does not mean only the sounds of nature or something of that matter. Natural sounds are the sounds of everything around us at all times, whether they be birds chirping or machines roaring. As I walked around the gallery space I was first drawn to the paint on the wall, which I'm sure was for another piece, but it was the first thing to have caught my eye. The wall was painted black, with some of the white exposed in the back making wonderous patterns that reminded me of the night sky. While I believe that the walls were for another piece entirely they added to the overall atmosphere of Following. It made we wish that Following had a more night and day feel to it. What I mean to say is that I wish that somehow there could have been a projection of some sorts to show what time of day Stern recorded his findings. It would have brought a much larger sense of time and place because it would have shown that what we were experiencing did not just take place in a few hours, but in a few days. Four main speakers played the sounds and cameras attached to Eyecon recorded our movements. I tried walking back and fourth from one area to another and even running a few times to get different sounds. What I found a lot of times was that the sounds were all very similar, but that might not have been Stern's fault at all, he was just recording what he experienced. Another step that I wish he could have taken was to have many more speakers just blasting the sounds that he recorded, because I noticed myself struggling to try and hear the sounds, as they were not very loud. All in all a good piece, but it needed some major adjustments to make it grand, at least for me.
Kevin Hand
When I heard that an animator would be coming for a presentation to visit our university I was more than thrilled to go and attend his presentation in the ASUN Theater. Especially when I heard that it was an animator from the Adult Swim program Superjail. Myself being an aspiring animator I was expecting to hear the processes that they go through from storyboarding to the actual animations themselves. When Hand began his presentation he began to discuss how he arose to the poison of an animator today. He presented a few previous projects that highlighted the peak points of his amateur career, from 3D modeling for crime scenes to modeling ships that have been raised from the deep and even futuristic machines that have not even been put into creation yet. However, while all fascinating and a helpful reference to how one rises to the field of a professional, the highlight of his presentation that I was looking for was the information about his animation. Yet when he finally got to the subject of talking about animation, help only spent a minimal time explaining any, if any, information at all or even showing videos of what he worked on. All of the videos that he showed were from YouTube, which to me showed a bit of unprofessionalism. I would have better enjoyed the videos if he brought them himself. Instead the Internet at the university was having a few kinks that day, so the videos became laggy, from their already slow-loading time. The videos were also very blurry and were hard to see, especially projected on a wall as it was. Another problem he had was that he tried to use Skype to chat with one of the higher-ups on Adult Swim, which would have been amazing had the Internet been online. It was also apparent that Hand had no idea what he was doing when he tried to access the network to chat, something I would have expected he would have sorted out before his presentation. All in all Hand was a disappointed and shallow presentation, full of bugs and technical difficulties that could have been avoided or worked around had he have been prepared.
Joseph Delappe
When going into Professor Joseph Delappe's presentation, I only had his Gandhi work to go on, and even then I knew very little about it. Truthfully I had no idea how one would make art out of video games that had no graphical value for its time. Today, especially after the introduction of Ico from Team Ico, many video games are trying to make themselves accepted as art. With their improved graphics and new ways to warp light and even create cartoony vector graphics for those more oriental style video games, such as Okami. However what Delappe did was not art directly on the video games themselves, but it was more like performance art, reenacting scenes from famous shows such as friends, and acting them out over the internet with microphones. For many years also have tablets now that allow us to draw on the computer as we would on paper, but one of the more impressive projects was when Delappe attached a pencil to a mouse and had the tracks of his mouse create pictures with it. A wonderful concept with interesting results. When he introduced the Gandhi work I was surprised about the massive scale to which the entire project took place. From actually walking the entire length of Gandhi's walk, to creating a towering replica of the man himself the effort put into the entire piece really put all the work into perspective for me. All in a pleasant presentation, though I wish there could have been more videos other process of many of his works, mostly pictures were shown.
--VMS
Having a bit of knowledge about Eyecon and its workings I had a small idea of what I was walking into when I went to see Jeremy Stern's piece Following. A recreation of sorts of the areas around us, Stern drowve all over and recorded his travels, not with commentary, but with the natural sounds that he encountered. In that way they created the commentary of what was where. To me "natural sounds" does not mean only the sounds of nature or something of that matter. Natural sounds are the sounds of everything around us at all times, whether they be birds chirping or machines roaring. As I walked around the gallery space I was first drawn to the paint on the wall, which I'm sure was for another piece, but it was the first thing to have caught my eye. The wall was painted black, with some of the white exposed in the back making wonderous patterns that reminded me of the night sky. While I believe that the walls were for another piece entirely they added to the overall atmosphere of Following. It made we wish that Following had a more night and day feel to it. What I mean to say is that I wish that somehow there could have been a projection of some sorts to show what time of day Stern recorded his findings. It would have brought a much larger sense of time and place because it would have shown that what we were experiencing did not just take place in a few hours, but in a few days. Four main speakers played the sounds and cameras attached to Eyecon recorded our movements. I tried walking back and fourth from one area to another and even running a few times to get different sounds. What I found a lot of times was that the sounds were all very similar, but that might not have been Stern's fault at all, he was just recording what he experienced. Another step that I wish he could have taken was to have many more speakers just blasting the sounds that he recorded, because I noticed myself struggling to try and hear the sounds, as they were not very loud. All in all a good piece, but it needed some major adjustments to make it grand, at least for me.
Kevin Hand
When I heard that an animator would be coming for a presentation to visit our university I was more than thrilled to go and attend his presentation in the ASUN Theater. Especially when I heard that it was an animator from the Adult Swim program Superjail. Myself being an aspiring animator I was expecting to hear the processes that they go through from storyboarding to the actual animations themselves. When Hand began his presentation he began to discuss how he arose to the poison of an animator today. He presented a few previous projects that highlighted the peak points of his amateur career, from 3D modeling for crime scenes to modeling ships that have been raised from the deep and even futuristic machines that have not even been put into creation yet. However, while all fascinating and a helpful reference to how one rises to the field of a professional, the highlight of his presentation that I was looking for was the information about his animation. Yet when he finally got to the subject of talking about animation, help only spent a minimal time explaining any, if any, information at all or even showing videos of what he worked on. All of the videos that he showed were from YouTube, which to me showed a bit of unprofessionalism. I would have better enjoyed the videos if he brought them himself. Instead the Internet at the university was having a few kinks that day, so the videos became laggy, from their already slow-loading time. The videos were also very blurry and were hard to see, especially projected on a wall as it was. Another problem he had was that he tried to use Skype to chat with one of the higher-ups on Adult Swim, which would have been amazing had the Internet been online. It was also apparent that Hand had no idea what he was doing when he tried to access the network to chat, something I would have expected he would have sorted out before his presentation. All in all Hand was a disappointed and shallow presentation, full of bugs and technical difficulties that could have been avoided or worked around had he have been prepared.
Joseph Delappe
When going into Professor Joseph Delappe's presentation, I only had his Gandhi work to go on, and even then I knew very little about it. Truthfully I had no idea how one would make art out of video games that had no graphical value for its time. Today, especially after the introduction of Ico from Team Ico, many video games are trying to make themselves accepted as art. With their improved graphics and new ways to warp light and even create cartoony vector graphics for those more oriental style video games, such as Okami. However what Delappe did was not art directly on the video games themselves, but it was more like performance art, reenacting scenes from famous shows such as friends, and acting them out over the internet with microphones. For many years also have tablets now that allow us to draw on the computer as we would on paper, but one of the more impressive projects was when Delappe attached a pencil to a mouse and had the tracks of his mouse create pictures with it. A wonderful concept with interesting results. When he introduced the Gandhi work I was surprised about the massive scale to which the entire project took place. From actually walking the entire length of Gandhi's walk, to creating a towering replica of the man himself the effort put into the entire piece really put all the work into perspective for me. All in a pleasant presentation, though I wish there could have been more videos other process of many of his works, mostly pictures were shown.
--VMS
//Art 343 Pepakura Mask
My first try a Pepakura. I decided to create Noface's mask from Spirited Away. The curves were a bit difficult to do, but it was fun to see the end product. It's large enough for me to put over my face and its circular form gives a bit of strength.
--VMS
--VMS
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