Logo Application

I fixed the 'o' and 'a' interaction and started printing on cardboard looking card stock. I tested all the colors from my line and not all of them were successful. The two pieces I've tried are a wrap to go around the fabric and the other is a tag.

Inspiration

I just watched a few videos to get some inspiration for my editing process. I like how these videos kind of "map" movement so the viewer can contemplate not only the movement, but the complex mechanics of our bodies. By slowing down video, we can also use this meditative quality to explore other parts of our psyches. The last video by A.lter S.essio is very language oriented, and has a lot to do with muscle memory.



Choros from Michael Langan on Vimeo.





A.lter S.essio - INSULA-INSULAE - Équilibre from FP / A.lter S.essio on Vimeo.

Journey into the Pixelated Mind

The books have begun.

Over the last two days I finally started thinking spatially. I decided 4x3 feet would be a really good size for my full sized posters. That size boils down to 6 4x6 accordions that will be the series.

I folded an accordion to scale and with paper I'm fairly certain will be the thickness of the poster paper... I did this to determine the thickness of the text blocks I need to make so that they match.

This text block you see here is experimentation for my book 'I___' I would like to use thicker pages and maybe sections of three folios instead of four and only three sections instead of four...

I obviously need to practice laying the type straight and I'd also like to improve the work by adding a loose grid to the pages.... And printing the transfers with wax paper in between to prevent the transfers from rubbing in the opposite pages once closed. :D

Book Covers

Book covers for two books.

Convergence

I'm still trying to really nail down my thesis.

Thoughts that are running through my head have to do with the documentation of learning. Learning is a process we use as an adaptive mechanism. It helps us survive, but it also enhances our collective knowledge. Documentation is an intriguing human characteristic. With the advancement of technology comes new forms of documentation. I want to explore the language of learning, and process the manipulations into a video/audio presentation.

I've experimented with some more sounds from my ukulele, and have worked on using interruptions and echoes to help communicate an ideas of history, confusion, and compilation.

Questions - The Right Direction?

Here are some questions that are part of my exam. These ones are pretty solid and filled with information, but as I progress through the test they will become more abstract and "dada" inspired.

Logo & Application Inspiration & Driftwood.

Logo cleaned up even more & tweaked, plus color!

                 

Inspiration for packaging/logo application. Thinking about getting a stamp of the logo.

Over the weekend I went to Eastern Point and collected more drift wood for the gallery installation. A piece like this will hang on the wall horizontally with 4 pegs coming out of it for a yard or so of fabric to drape off of.

Patterns in Color & Redrawn 'Afternoon'

What possible outcomes could be of final products using the patterns and color line I designed. I've ordered all of these from Spoonflower in 8x8 square swatches to have a test run before making more decisions.

Redrew 'afternoon' by hand with french curves, scanned it to my computer and traced it with the pen tool. This is it!

Synth controlling video

I'm starting to understand Max a bit better, having spent a few hours looking at how the Wiimote patch and this synthesizer patch are constructed. I spent a while trying to get the output values from the synthesizer to control certain inputs in a video patch, and I'm getting the results I want. The most difficult thing moving forward is going to be figuring out how to map individual keys to specific video clips. I took some time to understand how the Wiimote patch works and should be able to connect it to video in the same way as I did with the keyboard. I was having second thoughts about using the Wiimote last week, but the more I look into it the more I want to have it be a part of my project. I almost feel the opposite now - I may not bother with the keyboard and just stick to the Wiimote, adding the third dimension of movement/gesture to the connection I'm trying to make.

Ships (& things)

Size Comparisons

(just because)

Oil platform

Supertanker (AbQaiq)

Whale Factory Ship (Nisshin Maru)

Whaleship from 1797 (Essex)

Sperm Whale

Alang, India

This is a graphic representation of the world's largest ship graveyard. If you go to Google Maps and type in Alang, India, you will see well over 100 vessels dotting the coastline. The world's longest ship, the Seawise Giant, is one of those abandoned here. It waits with the rest to be broken down for scrap metal.

Lots of Stuff

Printed, folded, pressed "How to Kill a Bear." Edition of 15. Set type to letterpress print title onto cover (will print Wednesday.) The cover will be a folded sheet of red, handmade paper, pamphlet stitched to the book.  

Upon extensive reading I assembled a medley of Native American literature for my next book. The book will be a portfolio of 2 stories, a medicinal remedy, a lino-cut print, and a brief editors note. I made a mock-up of the cover and set the type for the content.

Lastly, I experimented with printmaking in my living room using my new book-press. After much failure I was able to figure out a recipe to get a near-perfect lino-cut print (to be included in aforementioned book.)

Savikalpa Samadhi

Overview - the Movie

I came across the above video this weekend via a friend, which echoed conversations I shared with David Gatten and Erin Espelie. I'm enthralled with the idea of stepping so far back from everyone that we start to be aware of our own sentience and where we are existing in time, and what that means to how we derive language and place ourselves within a timeline. There is a phrase that's uttered by one astronaut in this movie called "savikalpa samadhi", taken from sanskrit that describes different levels of consciousness. Having "an altered state of consciousness" myself, I want to explore how this has changed my understanding of learning and my place in the stream of life. To quote Lawrence Weiner, "you are in the stream of life whether you like it or not. And if you're going to be in the stream of life you have to accept the responsibilities - I'd like a few more of the pleasures, but there doesn't seem to be time."

Watch the whole interview here: Lawrence Weiner

more experimenting

I finally got youtube to work! I put up little clips of what I've been doing (what you saw last class, and what I've done since). The account is rwallacethesis and will hopefully be changed once I come up with a title for my project.

I've continued experimenting with my videos and projecting them onto different surfaces. I want to do as little editing on screen as possible and instead play with how they're projected. For now, I'm not paying any attention to sound and focusing solely on the videos/images.

I've been working on how to put into words what I'm trying to do to better explain myself. Here's what I've come up with:

Taking routine situations/events that everyone experiences and abstractly depicting them with a medium relating to my specific experience. A commentary on the fact that people tend to drift through routine situations/events without paying close attention to everything around them, and my attempt at forcing myself to stop doing that and analyze the routine things. The medium I choose for each video will be what stuck out to me in the moment or what I spent the most time noticing.

...still not sure if that makes much sense, and I'm still working on trying to get the words out of my head... so many more updates will come...

Starting to Design the Exam

The next dream theme that I am tackling is the impossible exam/test.

Here's a screen cap to give you an idea of the sterility of the design, and the type of questions I'm asking.

We met.

The seven of us (Alexa, Gina, Tim, Lauren, Jess, Ian, Nicole) met Thursday morning to talk about show related things. Here are my notes to spark discussion about this in class:


TITLE

translating
translation and recording
best for last
explain
explanation
transcript
render
r ender
rENDer

All of our projects seem to be translating information from a source into a different output. Right now we're running with the 'render' idea as working title that may fluctuate over the next few weeks.



POSTCARD

We will each have three sketches for ideas by March 7, meet, collaborate and come up with one design from there. Important to keep in mind that the logo on the postcard will be used in vinyl form as well.

Where should we order from?
Cost?
Turn around time?



VINYL

Name of show/names will comes from our decision of a design for the postcard.

Where should we order from?
Cost?
Turn around time?



GALLERY

We will meet in the gallery after spring break (March 21 sound good?) once everyone has a better idea of what their output will be to plan out how we will fit.
How many portable walls are there?
Inviting professionals?
Cost of food/drink? Who is preparing this? (for later discussion, but still a factor)

Over the weekend I spent time thinking and testing out the new glasses. I shot videos almost everywhere I went then watched the videos each night. I decided that I want to focus on (what I consider to be) routine situations such as going to the grocery store, driving, etc. I'll narrow it down to a few specific things once I get more footage. I want to focus on routine situations because even though they're pretty straight forward video and most people have experienced each situation for themselves, it's a personal experience and different for everyone when they're actually there. I want to distort the videos in some way to depict how I felt or what I was thinking during each situation so that the video becomes a personal reflection on an action I did. I also want to play with the sound and mash up sounds together/put the wrong audio with a video/etc. to make it even more personal and harder to figure out what is even happening.

I experimented distorting the video (ignoring the sound aspect) by taking stills that caught my eye and zooming in then doing line drawings of them and projecting the video through them. I also projected the videos onto water with a faucet on so that the water was rippling through the video. I want to experiment a lot more. 

I made a few accounts on video hosting sites...but that didn't work out. I left that as the last thing to do (yesterday afternoon) and somehow spent most of the day trying to figure it out. At first, all websites would only let me upload one video because of the size. So I exported them in smaller sizes and only short clips just to get the main idea across and youtube let one upload and then gave me a message that said "The server has rejected the file. Please follow these steps and upload the file again." but the steps didn't help and I kept getting the same message after waiting 30-50 minutes for it to go through the act of uploading and at the last second tell me no. So I need to spend time figuring that out too.

Making things in Max

I've been learning how to use Max from watching tutorials and downloading & studying existing patches (programs). Many patches are available for free online and vary from useful widgets & tools for dropping into patches to complete, functional patches that function either in Max or as standalone software. I've been watching lots of examples of synthesizer, sampler and loop machine patches. I've also watched many tutorials involving the Wiimote, but I'm not sure if I'm compelled to use it because it's useful or just because it would be cool. I've been considering changing my input device from the Wiimote to my Micron, a small scale synth that can act as a midi controller.

Whichever I decide on, I'm thinking the program I make will set the input up to play audio clips of each note on the 12-note scale - onto corresponding keys on the Micron, or specific buttons/combinations on the Wiimote (if I use the Wiimote I'd probably set it up as a loop machine instead of a note-for-note synth).

The data produced by the Wiimote/Micron would also have to control a second patch that plays video in sync with the gestures/keystrokes being used to create the music. I've been making video programs and playing around with effects for the past few days, and am starting to figure out a plan on turning the audio into something visual, based off of the sonochromatic scale. I found lots of resources online offering free video loops for VJ shows. I grabbed some and played around with them in Max, and noticed that there's many that have pretty solid color schemes - some stay basically red or blue or purple, etc. I'm pretty sure that I can eventually make something that connects the notes being played to one of 12 different clips to represent that note's color. Using Max's crossfade, several clips can be spliced together at once to represent chords/multiple notes being hit at once.

In the end, with any luck you'll be able to create music using at least one of these devices that simultaneously controls live video in colors that relate to the notes being played.

Logo. Gallery Sketches.

More iterations: fixed the letter spacing issue with the sans serif 'afternoon', made the original 'afternoon' larger, tried drawing 'one' by hands, re-drew 'afternoon'.

Sketches of ideas for the gallery.

Brainstorming

I've been thinking a lot about specific dream themes, and which one I want to tackle next. Though I haven't quite figured out the next "theme" piece, I have figured out a separate, more general "dream" piece that I think would be worthwhile.

I want to create a book of photographs that I have taken that I consider to be "dreamy" or "dream-like". Images that I have captured that evoke the memory of my own dreams may help my audience experience what my individual dream world is like.

I might integrate them with typography. I might not.

A few examples:

What do you think?