here’s a .gif based on some photos I took. I realized that I was making those YouTube animations, but the .gif’s are probably simpler and smaller, if maybe a tiny bit more time consuming to make. Hmm… I wonder if you could really tell the difference, quality-wise?
.gif part 5,999,991 October 12, 2006
.GIFfery, part 1 October 6, 2006
me and bennett are working on our first attempts at gif animation right now. this is a pixelated gradient i just made.
Robots and bikes October 4, 2006
These are some things I’ve been working on recently.
The site is for bikers to report information about specific facilities (buildings and dorms) concerning bikes. Who is in charge, their contact information, the amount of parking available, etc. This is the synthesis of a couple things that have happened to me. This summer I watched a couple documentaries about the Black civil rights movement. The movement interested me, especially watching source material – a march of thousands of people walking across Alabama for the integration of schools, people getting thrown down on the street and refusing to fight back because of their commitment to the philosophy of non-violence, etc.
Coming back to school and biking around in the city as I usually do, I put some concrete sentiments – anger at the city for not having enough bike lanes/parking – into action. I put up posters for a meeting to discuss courses of action about what NYU students could do about the situation. And this is the result – an easy to understand interface guiding you in the right direction to the people who are in charge for anyone with the sentiments that I’ve had.
This is a piece I did the other night. I’ve been really interested in Honda’s pursuit of manufacturing robots for human use. Their newest robot, ASIMO, is amazing in a “look what they did” sense of amazing. He can talk to you, run at 6km/hr, handle simple tasks, play soccer, etc. He even has his own exhibit at Disneyland where you sit for 15 minutes and watch ASIMO interact with his family that adopted him.
At the same time robots seem to me the pinnacle of technology, where we are going from first automated machines like the cotton gin and the steam engine, to even recent capabilities like the internet and such.
So I like tracing the history of things, and this is a great example. The images are all separated across various Honda websites, and I lined them up in order to give a timeline sort of feel to it. Because looking at them in sequence really does give a feel of the evolution of Honda’s line of robots.
Radical Cartography September 29, 2006
After looking for a little bit at some of the other maps Jake from Gothamist had written about, I came across Radical Cartography, a series of maps by this dude Bill Rankin that are really awesome. The site’s not the most user-friendly (esp for someone who specializes in visualizing information), but after a little exploring I was pretty excited with his products. He’s touched upon a lot of the themes I’ve thought about, like personal mappingand messing with scale. He’d even duplicated a map of building heights in manhattan that I’d done myself on a lazy day at Pratt this summer.
I think I’ll contribute something to the site in the next few days – he has an open call for interesting maps. In the meantime, it’s definitely some good fodder for project ideas.
NYC Household Income September 28, 2006
One of a series of maps I made for Transportation Alternatives analyzing the connection between car ownership and income in the city. From a graphic design standpoint, I think this one definitely gets its message across the quickest: purple=high income, yellow=low income.
Since I posted them last night, the maps have already gotten more hits than almost any of my photos – I guess that means they do their job of catching the eye.
- Adam
Update: I’ve since found out the reason for all the activity was that my maps were blogged in gothamist this morning. Hurrah!
camera experiments September 25, 2006
I have always been fascinated with animation, and have tried my hand at it a few times with drawing.
My digital camera can take stills, as well as videos, but it also has a ‘continuous shot’ function.
This video compiles most of the experiments I have done thus far. YouTube makes it look kind of crappy because of the way they compress files, but I think you get the idea.
Animations are just like a very fast slide show, with lots of similar pictures all in a row.
Projectiles September 25, 2006
These are the ideas I’ve come up with so far for class projects. I’ve left them somewhat open-ended cause I’m not sure to what extent we want to work on these together or not. What I think would be fun is if we each led a project that involved each of the other two people – let’s talk about it tomorrow.
Map Art
One thing I mentioned at our first meeting was my interest in combining my knowledge of GIS with my goals as an artist. On the art side of things, this might mean exporting GIS files to Illustrator, or tracing land use patterns from google earth. But it also gets conceptual: What can a map say about a person, a group of people, or a society as a whole? How can the idea of a “map” transcend physical space?
A map art project could take many forms, from purely visual to interactive and web-based, from something personal (a la our first assignment) to something with a broad audience and message. It’s also something that I know all three of us are interested in, so there’s collabo potential.
Stencils
Another idea I have is to design a series of stencils for street art. I’m real cognizant of the street art in my neighborhood, and I think it would be exciting to add something to that community. Obviously there’s issues with the illegality of it… maybe the official project would be the stencils themselves, not what I did with them. But you get to call the shots on that one, Kate.
Slides
The last theme I’ve been mulling over is the projection/slide show thing that we’ve discussed. I think it would be an interesting process to make a set of slides to be projected in an installation-type environment. Some possibilities:
- subtly alter old images to make something that looks like a regular slide show until you look closer
- create a narrative from existing slides
- make slides from photos, photoshop and illustrator files
cabbagehead September 24, 2006
another page for the coloring book. this one was another macro/illustrator mashup from pictures i’ve taken, i think it turned out pretty well. if you look close, the lines in the background aren’t as crisp as the guy is, and the figure could have been traced more carefully. But that’s just detail stuff – the process itself is legit. Next i want to draw something, scan it, and add a separate background (drawn? photoshopped?).
neighors and friends September 19, 2006
so my friend deenah is compiling a coloring book, and this is one of my submissions. the figures are both from scanned images that i traced in illustrator, and the background is a macro i took of some mushrooms. i’ve experimented with photorealistic collages before placing figures in strange small-world backgrounds, but this is the first time i’ve done it with a more stylized look. i like the way the images work together as a whole, though i think the stamp effect on the background doesn’t jive so well with the line illustration of the figures.
i think i wanna do more in this series this week, experimenting with different techniques for creating flat areas for coloring.
allmytshirts.com September 15, 2006
unfortunately that site it taken, but its just the most fitting name for this project that I have been working on this week.
I had mentioned it to a few people, so I wanted to put up some of it and get a bit of feedback.
I had been wanting to do some sort of project that incorporated images of my t-shirt collection. I had also wanted to do some sort of project that dealt with analysis of something, trying to generate data about a group or series of repeated things. I decided to write out “bios” for all my shirts, and they started to come out like mini-memiors, a blurb about the time in my life when I got them.
One thing I thought was to make a kind of social-networking site, as if each one of my shirts had its own MySpace profile. But that seems like more than the project needs, I’d rather have it be simpler.
Adam suggested being able to have some options about how to browse the collection – group by color, by age, chronologically by when I got them, etc. Here are some basic samples:
—————————————————————–
—————————————————–
Flying Fortress
Some point at the end of high school I heard about this t-shirt art show going down in Somerville. I went with Willie and my girlfriend at the time. I remember thinking it was a pretty cool scene, a part of Somerville I didn’t know, kinda ghetto but lots of art folks around, near the place where Willie had recently gotten his tattoo done. The show had work from TONS of artists, all mostly within the street art scene or kind of new graphic t-shirt style. Evil Designs + NFS Industries was running the thing, and they are Boston based. TEXTSTYLES it was called. I think I read about it on Woostercollective.com just as I was discovering all this street art shit going on. There are links to all the artists websites on the show website, so I used that as a resource for finding out more.
We were there for opening night. The deal was, most of the t shirts were going to be given away at the end of the show, and everyone at the opening got to fill out a card with their shirt size and make ranking the shirts that they liked by their number. So bascially when they took the show down, they drew cards and gave you the shirt that you had ranked highest that they had in your size. When we went to pick them up at the record store, every shirt was packaged in an envelope with a bunch of free schwag from the various designers and artists in the show, stickers and postcards, etc. Willie and Micaela got sweet shirts too. I like to think that my shirt is a unique print, which I think was the case with a lot of them. The color combo is nice and loud.
Flying Fortress has a great website, and I guess now I am just another one of his ’soldiers.’
=================================================
Fantasy Plants
John who sells silkscreened tees on the street, and we became friends. One time they invited me to come with them into San Francisco to help work on an installation at cafe. John was silkscreening a repeating pattern onto a wall on one side, and Suzanne was stapling all these stuffed tails onto the other. The same night we stopped by a gallery in SoMa where she had a show at the time. There were lots of drawings similar to this print of imaginary plants. Except that in all the drawings the plants were really bright colors and had crazy patterns on them. And then she had made stuffed versions of the bright colored plants, also with crazy bright fabrics, that were between 3-4 feet tall. She had them arranged in little clusters in the center of the gallery, almost like a little kid could walk through a tripped out fantasy forest of alien plant life.
This is a really popular shirt, and one of my favorites. It fits tight on me, the sleeves are almost more like 3/4 length style. People often ask me what the images are, if they are mushrooms.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Botanicare
(front)
(back)
Bio-Dynamic Plant Energy Products. This shirt was given to me when I was working at Environment Calfornia, when I first moved to Berkeley. This girl Kate came in with a box of clothes she didn’t want anymore, and I got it from her. I think she said she might have gotten it when she was working at the Berkeley Tropical plant store. I have always questioned their tagline “Naturally Superior.” I wear it and wonder if people think I’m some type of white supremecist. Or just a self absorbed asshole. It helps that the font is green and nice and relaxed looking. I have never heard of this company, maybe I should look them up.
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
Drumlin Farm
The summer before I went to college I got arrested for graffiti in Boston. My co-defendent had a drug charge on his record, so he had to do the state-run community service, but I got to choose mine. My buddy Tommy was working at the time at Drumlin Farm, on the maintenance crew. I didn’t have a job that summer so I just volunteered full time for 2 weeks and did all 80 hours in one shot.
Drumlin Farm is pretty great, about a 40 minute drive from my house, just in the suburbs of Boston. I had been there a lot as a kid. Its the place that basically every elementary school would go visit to see farm animals. They have other wild animals in cages too, and grow some food, but they never really showed you the fields when you were little.
It was a great time working there for 2 weeks. I got to drive the maintenance truck all around, and do stuff like fix fences and machete overgrown bushes, paint signs. Also Tom and I made it our mission to shirk off work a lot, waste time, run useless errands, take naps, go to the garbage dump. We were great at that. Earlier in the summer they had built a vegetable garden in his boss’ yard, so we spent a lot of time “working” there, eating fresh tomatoes.
We found a box of tee shirts one day rummaging around in the attic of the maintenance barn.
I felt pretty good about the whole experience, as the graffiti charges were kind of bullshit, at least I didn’t have to actually work very hard.
The drawing of the rooster is great, really detailed. It almost looks like its from an old lithograph or something, an old farming guide.
———————————————–
Each shirt would have its own page. Besides the links to outside web pages, I also want to have some linkability within the shirts. Maybe below each bio, there would be links to a category that the shirt fell into: Shirts I Bought When I was Living in California, Shirts With Text, Blue Shirts, Shirts with Designs on Both Sides, Shirts I Designed and Printed, Hand Printed Shirts, etc.
There are about 40-some shirts, I’m still working on it.
Hit up the comments button if you have ideas/suggetions/comments/criticism/advise/topical links.
