Sunday, January 15, 2012

Plan

I plan to make my project a photomosaic. It will be a composite image of Andy Warhol. I am going for an artistic statement that is not quite irony, but rather that oddly appropriate feeling that there is no term for. Right now my plan is to make the composite image a compilation of thousands of the same image, but this plan may evolve over time to become a compilation of his artwork. I will use methods we have learned in class, such as creating a canvas, tiling images, and blending.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Tuesday

What I did in lab today:

original




If you are sensing a theme here, that is because Audrey is the single most gorgeous person who ever lived. Also, purple is my favoite color. I would much rather look at purple than red. The picture was originally pretty bright, so I had to raise both thresholds a little bit.

In other news, I have no idea where I am going with this project. I really need to come up with something so I can blog about it.

Monday

This is the sepia that I came up with during class on Monday. I actually made it in response to step 1, before reading any of the rest of the lab, and by coincidence it was almost identical to sepia 2.
original

Monday, January 9, 2012

Response to Carr

The most important benefits of e-books that I immediately see are accessibility and the ease of correcting typographical errors. Accessibility is the factor that has popularized e-books in the first place. Every time I buy textbooks, I'm onboard. My choices are to make the 5-mile hike to the bookstore in the freezing rain, or order from home and wait 5 to seven business days for my books to show up, and either way half my money goes to paper and ink? I think I'll pass. And how often have you found a typo in a book and thought to yourself, "That's not a word. Who got paid to edit this thing?" knowing that it would not be corrected until the next printing (maybe). It would be satisfying to know that you could post a comment in a forum and have a corrected version of your book in your hands this week.

Convenience, however, comes at a high price. The benefits of e-books are overshadowed by the possibility of manipulation. The very word "censorship" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but it is a legitimate threat when media becomes digitized. The possibility of perpetual revision is also disconcerting, but digital media is the present and future, so we must learn to deal with its mutable nature. This is not an issue to be dealt with through legislation. When I read the phrase, "Such abuses can be prevented through laws," the anarchist-leaning libertarian in me shouted "I object!" Publishing protocol should be to assign a new edition number each time an edit beyond the correction of minor typographical errors occurs, in order to make it clear that the text differs from earlier editions. This introduces yet another obstacle. Can you imagine a trying to teach a piece of literature in the classroom? Teachers would stand in front of classes and say, "Make sure you download The Invisible Man edition 19.2; edition 19.3 is crap." For now, I am going to choose to have enough faith in my country to trust that its government would not be authoritarian enough to severely censor my books, and say that the ethical treatment of digital text is ultimately the responsibility of publishers, and the demand thereof is the responsibility of consumers. Citizens of countries under such authoritarian rule can't afford e-readers anyway.

What I Did This Weekend

I realize it's not much to look at. My goal was to show only the yellow flowers in color, then only the orange, only red, etc. I don't know why I made it my goal for the weekend. These pictures have nothing to do with my project so far, but we were putting things in grayscale on Friday, so it seemed to make sense at the time. I didn't quite get them where I wanted them to be; this is what I settled for.