FINAL REMINDER: BRING YOU FILES, AND MUSEUM VISUAL RESPONSE

Just to remind you: bring all your files from this semester, so you can burn a CD of all your projects.

The new projects should be named, per the naming convention we used on the midterm CD:

08-lastname-fairuse

09-lastname-lulu-A
09-lastname-lulu-B
09-lastname-lulu-C
09-lastname-lulu-D
09-lastname-lulu-E
09-lastname-lulu-F

10-lastname-lulucover

11-lastname-vector

12-lastname-music

13-lastname-galacticsanta

14-lastname-museumresponse

Lulu books available online

Links to the books on Lulu:

Experience the Journey:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/experience-the-journey/18692488



My Brainstorm is More Like a Slow Drip:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/my-brainstorm-is-more-like-a-slow-drip/18692647

Field trip info

Field trip on Wednesday, 11/30; meet up at the classroom – DON'T BE LATE, there's not a ton of slack time – and I'll see you at the museum.

For the morning class, the drivers will be Chelsea, Rachael and Sean. For the afternoon, it'll be Nick, Christian and Michelle. If you're a rider, versus a driver, it'd be nice if you threw your driver a buck or two for gas.

160 West Liberty Street, Reno, Nevada 89501 – here's the google map:


View Larger Map

1. Head northwest on Tahoe Blvd toward Deer Ct
1.9 mi

2. Turn right onto NV-431 E/Mt Rose Hwy
24.5 mi

3. Turn left onto US-395 N/S Virginia St
0.3 mi

4. Merge onto US-395 N via the ramp to Reno
8.4 mi

5. Take exit 66 for Mill St
0.2 mi

6. Turn left onto Mill St
0.8 mi

7. Slight left onto Ryland St
0.6 mi

8. Slight left onto E Liberty St
0.5 mi

9. Turn left onto Hill St
Destination will be on the left

Course Evaluation Surveys

For the morning class, the link is:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Lanier_DART_230_1


For the afternoon class, the link is:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Lanier_DART_230_2

FINAL TIMES

For the morning section the final will be:

Monday 12/5
11:30am-2:30pm

For the afternoon section, it's:

Wednesday 12/7
3pm-6pm

Links to Vector Artists

Here are links to the artists whose work I showed in class today:

Alberto Ceriteno
Chris Leavens
Irena Zablotska
Jonny Wan

Titles for the Lulu books

For the afternoon class – covers are due at the beginning of class Monday. For the morning class, we'll have an hour in-class at the start of class Monday to finish up your covers.

Morning Section:

Experiencing the Journey

Page order:
Heath Pierson
Brenda Cartagena
Sean Collins
Macy Miller
Marina McCoy
Shannon O'Leary
Chelsea Christoph
Rachael Robertson
Lauren Schultz
Kate Henkle
Danny Majid

Afternoon Section:

My Brainstorm is More Like a Slow Drip

Page order:
Christian McClellan (02-07)
Tailor Pollak (08-13)
Nick Cahill (14-19)
Hedvig Spangs (20-25)
Spencer Reeves (26-31)
Dan Walker (32-37)
Daliah Vargas (38-43)
Dylan Glasgow (44-49)
Michelle Mattingly (50-55)
Matea Firk (56-61)
Matt Brill (62-67)

01-brainstorm.pdf

Next assignment: Lulu Book Project

Next Monday will be a work period for your six-page sequence, so come prepared with whatever raw materials you need (images, ideas) to use the work period profitably.

Here are the specs for the images in your "sequence" project -- the one we're printing up through lulu.com. You should have the images you need at the start of the class, so you can just jump into it when class starts. You need to have at least a basic sketch (drawn out on paper, or cobbled together in Photoshop) of your general idea for the sequence.

Dimensions for Lulu book project
You will have 6 pages to fill in an art book we're publishing through Lulu.com. One page is like an intro page for yourself and your work, which should include your name. It can be a sort of "artist's statement," or it can otherwise set the stage for the images to follow. The following five pages should be a series of images that somehow work together as a sequence.

The dimensions at which you should create the work are:

Final page size will be 7.5" x 7.5" at 300 dpi.
The pages need a 1/8" bleed all the way around, so you'll create your photoshop files at 7.75" x 7.75" (at 300 dpi, this comes out to 2325 pixels by 2325 pixels).

Keep in mind, as you're designing the sequence, that you will have three "two page spreads," where the image on the lefthand page will be facing the image on the righthand page. Think about how the images on those facing pages will affect each other, in terms of content, color, composition, and so on.

If you're still chewing through what a "sequence" is, remember that a potential starting place could be:

1. Time changes through a fixed location. What is a single place, that goes through changes as time passes, and how are those changes made visible?

2. Spatial changes with a fixed subject. Is there a character, or object, that travels through different spaces?

3. Transformations of a character or object. Think of Klinger's "glove" etching. Is there a common image that goes through a variety of changes of scale, of stature, of meaning?

4. Different aspects of a single thing. Think Hokusai's Mount Fuji series. Is there a thing, a person or a place that can be looked at through a variety of lenses -- the lens of history, of myth, of geology, etc?

5. Formal variation and rhythm. Remember that abstracts images can function in sequence, riffing on common formal elements throughout the multiple images.

6. Storytelling. Any sequence tells a story of some sort. Is there some sort of narrative that could occur through the five images? Think of Hogarth's "Harlot's Progess," or the comics examples I showed.

And you should "own" your artwork in this project -- you can shoot your own images, or draw your own images. You can use stock images (free or purchased).

Also here's the link with the info on the Salvagery show -- Nov. 5 deadline:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=247247048660835

Homework for Monday

For Monday's class, come prepared with a sketch for your idea for the "fair use" project. You will have one class period to work on it. The finished project will be due a week from today, at the beginning of class.

Please keep your source images as well as our finished image, so we will more clearly be able to evaluate whether you have a possible case for "fair use" of those source images. Remember, in class you will present your image, and make your case that your image is a legally protected image; the class will act as the "prosecution," making the argument that your image is not protected by "fair use,' and is in fact in breach of copyright law.

You need to be prepared with a written statement of roughly a page in length, outlining your legal "fair use" defense. What elements of your work correspond to the protections of fair use, and how can you back that up with an argument focusing on your intentions and the evidence of what's there in your work? For instance, you might think of your work as a "parody," but what is the actual satirical comment you're making with the work, and how is that commentary supported by the images and the way they're used?

The intended venue of the work could have a strong bearing on whether your work is "protected" or not -- so please explain if the artwork is intended to be shown on a T-Shirt, in a gallery, on a billboard, or what have you.

If you want to refresh yourself on some copyright info, there are free digital versions of the Duke Copyright & Fair Use comic here:

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/digital.php

Fair use can be invoked for the following reasons:

To report on news
To make a parody
To copy for class
To criticize
To quote for scholarly purposes
For research

And these are the "four guidelines" for fair use:

1. The Transformative Factor: The Purpose and Character of Your Use

2. The Nature of the Copyrighted Work

3. The Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Taken

4. The Effect of the Use Upon the Potential Market

More detailed info here:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

Projects for the CD

On the CD I'm collecting for the midterm, you should have the following projects. You should give them filenames like this:

"(2-digit project number)-(your last name)-(project title).fileextension"

So if your name is Jane Smith, and the project was the self portrait, you would name the file:

01-smith-selfportrait.jpg

If you have more than one image for the project, append letters (A,B, C):

01-smith-selfportrait-A.jpg
01-smith-selfportrait-B.jpg

All the files for the CD should be flattened files.

And here are the project titles I'd like you to use.

1. Digital self-portrait, from three scans:

01-lastname-selfportrait

2. Text/image combo project (at least two versions)

02-lastname-textimage-A
02-lastname-textimage-B

3. The response to the collage artist

03-lastname-collageresponse

4. The "composite" project (something small made large, or something large made small)

04-lastname-composite

5. The "fake news" project

05-lastname-fakenews

6. The "multiple yous" assignment

06-lastname-multipleme

7. The "Brushes" project

07-lastname-brushes


In a folder called "Writing," you should have:

1. A short reaction to "To Thine Own Selves Be True."

01-lastname-selves

2. A three-page response paper to a collage artist.

02-lastname-collagepaper

BRING YOUR FILES NEXT CLASS, WED 10/12

A reminder that we'll be burning CDs of all your work to date next class, for me to have backed up for the midterm grade. I'll bring the CDs, you bring the files.

Assignment for Monday, Oct. 3

The next assignment is to create a picture that will have four (or more) images of yourself in one single environment. Put another way, it'll be a picture of some space -- a room, landscape, whatever -- in which there are at least five images of you, realistically inhabiting the space. There should also be some overlapping among at least two of the "yous."

Part of this assignment is technical - thinking of how you are going to best execute your idea, making sure the lighting works in the way you want it to, making sure you've staged the scene in a way that works, utilizing a tripod perhaps in stabilizng your multiple shots. The other part of the assignment is creative -- thinking through what the realtionship between your four (or more) selves might be, and what their relationship to the environment might be. It will be relatively easy to just position yourself in a room in four different poses, and just piece the four photos together. But there should be some sort of drama that is expressed in the picture.

You can dress in different costume for your four or more selves, so that the multiple yous are multiple characters. Or you could take the multiple yous as different expressions of the same central personality. Is one version of you the ego, and the other the id? Is one a voice undermining you, and is another a contrary voice of optimism and hope? What are the different faces of your personality, and what sorts of relationships or conflicts do they have with one another? How could those relationships/conflicts be expressed through action, through expression, through gesture?

This doesn't have to be heavy at all -- you can have a comical take on the problem -- but the bottom line is that there should be some psychological relationship betwen the multiple "characters." It doesn't have to be obvious or over-the-top -- in fact, part of what made Mickey's image interesting was that there was a degree of ambiguity to the relationships, which invited the viewers to try and figure out what was going on. So it doesn't have to be "spelled out" -- but it does have to be there, somewhere.

You'll need to have your photos taken before next class -- which wil be a work period for combining the photos. I'll pair you up in groups of two during class today; it'll be a good way of covering people who don't have access to a digital camera, and it will be far easier to compose and shoot yourself properly with someone other than you taking the pictures. We will eventually be making prints of these images, so make sure you take the photos at print resolution.

Assignment for Wednesday (9/28)

On Wednesday, two things are due:

1. Your finished, and flattened, "fake news" image.

2. You should be prepared to give the class a photoshop tutorial, on any topic or effect you'd like to research. Google something you'd like to learn, or click around in the links on the "my blog list" column on the righthand side of this page (there are lots of good tutorials on those blogs). Remember, step yourself through it BEFORE you come to class, to make sure you understand all the steps, and have all the materials you need. You should be able to make your demonstration in about ten minutes.

Post a link or a one-sentence description of the tutorial you'd like to do in the "comments" to this blog post, including an indication of whether you're in the morning or afternoon section, checking to make sure no one else in your section has picked the same tutorial before you.

Assignment for Monday, Sept. 26

The current assignment is to fake a news story. This should involve at least three images you'e composited, and some supporting text -- the text could be as simple as a caption or headline, or you could write a mini news article to accompany the image, if appropriate. The "fake news" could be either something plausible, or something completely absurd. Either way, strive to make the image itself as convincing as possible, and try to create the accompanying caption or story in a way that it sounds like a real news story. Monday will be an in-class work day for this project, and it will be due at the begining of class the following Wednesday.

Come to class Monday with your raw materials for the project selected (or shot, if you're using any photos you plan to shoot yourself), and a basic sketch of your idea for the project.

Compositing Assignment: Making a small object large, or a large object small.

In this assignment, I want you to insert a small image into a large landscape, or a large image into a small space: think of putting a giant banana in the middle of Times Square, or putting the eiffel tower into an aquarium. This is a basic compositing exercise -- I want you to make it as convincing as possible. Six things to look for when compositing, to make consistent across your composited images:

1. Color Balance
2. Brightness and Contrast
3. Key Light Direction (and Shadows)
4. Perspective
5. Blur
6. Grain

Here's a good tutorial on changing the lighting source for an image by creating two layers for a single image, adjusting them to highlight and shadow values, and then blending the two layers:

Lighting a Giant Elephant By bpkelsey
http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161386&page=1

Due Wednesday: Your visual response to a collage artist

At the beginning of class Wednesday, have your completed and flattened visual response to your collage artist ready.

And FYI, the lab is open at the following times:

MWTR

8am-10am
7pm- 10pm

Fri

1pm-8pm

Sat

10am-8pm

Collage Artist Paper and Presentation: Assignment for Wednesday (9/7)

Write a three-page (doublespaced) paper on a collage artist, choosing from the list below. When you've selected your artist, post the artist's name in the "comments" below, along with which section of the class you're in -- morning or afternoon (and make sure no one in your section has already claimed that artist by checking out the comments before you). This is first come, first serve, so the quicker you pick and artist and comment, the wider choice you'll have.

Your paper should include some biographical background, to put the artist's work in context, and you should also choose two specific collage works by the artist, and give an aesthetic analysis of those works. You can talk about content -- what is the "meaning" of the piece, and how does the artist articulate that meaning? What sort of sources did the artist draw the collage material from, and how does that inform the meaning of the work? Also analyze its formal properties: how has the artist used color? Composition? Variation - of size, of light areas/dark areas, etc? Negative space and positive space? Rhythm? Texture? Is there a foreground and a background -- and if so, how do they relate to each other?

The central message of your paper should be a summary of the particular methods the artist uses and the effects the artist achieves through collage. You can break down the three-page structure like this:

Page 1: Central message and bio
Page 2: Analysis of one collage
Page 3: Analysis of second collage

You will be presenting your paper next Wednesday (since there's no class this coming Monday). Bring a printed-out version of the paper and visual materials (the two images you've chosen, and anything else that will help in explaining your chosen artist and his/her work -- for the presentation, you can make a powerpoint and/or bring digital images to project). You will also be making a digital collage that is in some way a response to the artist's work; we will be working on that assignment for a couple classes. This is not to be a copy of any of the artist's work -- but take some principles that the artist embodies, and apply them to a work of your own making. For instance, Max Ernst used illustrations from 19th-century popular illustrated novels and science books and combined them to make a kind of disjointed story. What would a collage-story look like if it were assembled from science books of today?

So - due in one week - the paper (which you will present), and the beginning materials of your "artist response" collage, so you can begin working on that in class next Wednesday.

Use the MLA guide for citing internet sources for your bibliography, for the paper:

http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite5.html#1

And here's the list of collage artists. Not all of them were primarily collage artists, but all used collage:

Jean Arp
Romare Bearden
Umberto Boccioni
Mark Bradford
Georges Braque
Joseph Cornell
Arthur G. Dove
Marcel Duchamp
Max Ernst
John Heartfield
Hannah Hoch
David Hockney
Lee Krasner
Kazimir Malevich
Man Ray
Henri Matisse
Pablo Picasso
Ad Reinhardt
Allison Renshaw
Mimmo Rotella
Kurt Schwitters
Bernie Stephanus
Jonathan Talbot
Cecil Touchon
Marnie Weber

Text and Image: Assignment for Wednesday

Image and text project. You will be making two different pictures, working from the same initial image. Produce an image that can relate to text in an interesting way. Create that image either by shooting it yourself (it can be a staged image, or an image "caught on the fly"), or it can be an image that is collaged from at least three sources (if you want to make a drawing as one of your sources, that's perfectly acceptable -- otherwise you can cull images from Google images and so on).

Using that image as a base, make two seperate treatments of the image, with legible text in each.

In treatment #1, use text that has a sense of "interior monologue." It doesn't literally have to be an interior monologue, but it should have that interior quality -- as if we're listening in on the thoughts of someone -- perhaps the thoughts of someone in the picture, perhaps the thoughts of someone looking at the scene (as if we're looking at the scene through someone's eyes, and hearing their thoughts).

In treatment #2, take the same image and place text in it that has a quality of "exterior commentary" -- the type of commentary one might find in a news caption or textbook, explaining what's happening, or somehow passing judgement on the scene. It should be as if the words are coming from a source that's not participating in the scene -- but commenting upon it from some sort of remove.

Each treatment of type should be distinct, utilizing different fonts and different layout strategies. Think about how the text relates to the image both conceptually (in the manner of an idea) and formally (how it sits on the page, how the shapes of the letters relate to the imagery, etc). Try to be as radically different in your font treatments as possible. For instance, if you have one treatment where the text is all one font, horizontal, small, and in one color, the other treatment might mix different fonts, run the text vertically, large, and in various colors.

You will have class time to work on this project on Wednesday. But come prepared with an idea, and with your text and images already selected.

Assignment for Monday

There's a short reading and response due for Monday's class -- "To Thine Own Selves Be True, A Review of Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen." Write two short paragraphs in response -- print out your response and bring it to class. We will be discussing the article. Though the article is of a book that's "old" in terms of the development of the internet, I think it brings up some insights and issues that are still relevant (and the author of the book under review, Sherry Turkle, is still writing about contemporary digital culture). The article is partly about the way people negotiate or change their identity in terms of online or "digital" culture, and since we're creating a digital self-portrait, I thought it would be interesting food for thought. There are a series of questions at the end of the article you could address yourself to; I'm most interested in your position on the "ominous" scenario and the "positive" scenario -- which do you think is closer to the truth?

http://www.emcp.com/intro_pc/reading16.htm

And here are links for downloading a copy of the syllabus, if you'd like your own copy:

Syllabus for Section 1 (the 10am class)

Syllabus for Section 2 (the 1pm class)

Welcome

Hi there -- and welcome to the blog for the Digital Darkroom Class.

For next class :

Assemble personal materials for scanning to create a digital self-portrait -- be sure NOT to include photos or other images of your physical self. Give some thought to objects and textures that somehow say something about you, your identity, your sense of self. Make sure to bring at least three seperate things (all of them have to be able to be placed on a scanning bed, of course).

Please remember to acquire a jump drive, if you don't already have one -- it would be good to have it for Wednesday.

Here's a link to a book that might be a useful resource:

Photoshop CS5, Volume 1: Visual QuickStart Guide

And here are some links to some of the artists whose work I showed in class:

Dave McKean
Jill Greenberg
Flickr "Brushes" gallery
Chris Jordan
Alberto Seveso
Andrea Innocent
Emily Eibel (Tomby Illustration)
eBoy Pixel Art
12:31 and the Visible Human project

Finding Paths through the world's photos: