Projects in Digital Design Fall '06

Digital Human – Rough draft

ericlewis — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:35:12 +0000

I made this while reading an article about genetic engineering and its interface with computers. As the title tells, this is a rough draft of what I’m thinking of doing with it. Maybe a three part – with these images as the middle ground between human and robot.

the duo-shaped alphabet

ericlewis — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 03:13:32 +0000

I thought of doing this a while ago, but the first attempt ended in a computer crash. The second attempt went better.

interesting project

bennett — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:34:32 +0000

from one of the big guys, suprisingly. Any of you guys heard of anything like this before? the Yahoo Time Capsule. Interesting the themes they picked to organize it around…

I also wonder about the technology – are they going to bury a big hard drive? Maybe they should bury like a mac mini and a monitor and some future power adapters. Hehe.

ericlewis — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 14:10:56 +0000

In my recent work I have been thinking a lot more about modifying the look of the text to fit the emotion of the work. This design comes from lyrics of a Radiohead song I was listening to, “Fitter Happier,” matched to a random picture I found of a business man walking down the street looking charmed with himself. The song is composed of a vocal track created by a computer program that speaks the text that you type, laid over a mix of harsh guitar sounds and random sampled sounds, emoting a sense of fright among words that should be inspiring to the contemporary state of modern business.

The sounds and speaking of a computer program create the irony of the track, and the only line that speaks directly to the point of the song is this ending line, “a pig in a cage on antibiotics.”

Slide Tracings

Brock — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:59:08 +0000

Anthony, originally uploaded by Qaanaaq.

One in a series of quick illustrations I’ve been doing by tracing stuff from projected slides onto printer paper. A similar (but more pleasingly tactile) process as tracing in Illustrator. At this point the only thing “digital” about these is that they’re scanned… but I could easily see doing a lot of subtle photoshop manipulations.

While I was doing these I was thinking I could use this technique for the graphs and stuff in my final project (I’ll explain more in class). But then I thought of how much time it would take to make graphs, turn them into slides, trace the slides, scan them in, and edit them. Still… a cool process.

- A

flyers and videos

bennett — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:52:54 +0000

here is a flyer I made for the most recent Dangerbox show:

Simple and quick, effective though. I tried initially doing it with the entire world flipped upside down, but all the continents together just look like weird animal shapes already, so they just kind of look like weird animal shapes still.
The text I stamped by hand with my alphabet stamp set and then scanned.

Here is the most recent animation I made. A collection of clips from the beginning of the fall. I think it works well to just make one of these like every month or so, because it takes up so many photos that its hard to get a lot of “footage” at one time. So the shots are not so long and it can be hard to splice them together.
Music by Yesterday’s New Quintet: “I am Singing”

Brock — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 04:24:49 +0000

The last time I posted, I was considering focusing on mapping for a long-term project, specifically trying to relate it to my personal life. Bennett gave me the email of someone at Eyebeam who specializes in that kind of thing, so I’m gonna talk to him about how I might go about tracking my day activity.
In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of somewhat less ambitious personal maps I’d like to try out:
- mapping my itunes library. I’d like to tag the countries where the music I listen to is from, export the info to an xml file, and make a world (or US) map of my musical tastes.
- visualizing my friendships. this wouldn’t be a literal map, but a graph of everybody i’ve been friends with or in relationships with since i was born.
in other news, i’m going to be doing a weekly series of maps for gothamist on nyc stuff, so i’ll definitely be hitting you guys us for ideas and critique. My first post, on density and subway service in brooklyn and queens, should be going up today.

ericlewis — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 21:02:19 +0000

Customizing gradients

ericlewis — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:48:04 +0000

This is a genre I’d like to get into more.

“hey eric have you thought of editing googlemaps APIs?”

ericlewis — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 03:09:10 +0000

After hearing Brock’s suggestion last meeting, I have been transitioning the biker website to a google maps based interface.

It can still be found here but I like the new interface a lot more.