My work is an attempt to mesh up childish concepts together using various applications to create media that deems fun. The idea behind “The Adventures of Sir Potato” was inspired from a hamster avatar picture that I use for gaming platforms. When I met people on those platforms, many mistaken my avatar to be a potato instead. Thus, when I was stuck as to what to center my animation on, I decided why not do it off of a potato. When being compared to a potato, specifically a coach potato, it is meant that one is lazy and lacks motivation to do anything. With that in mind, I decided to create the character Sir Potato and to narrate a story through the
animation.

The applications used in this piece were Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere; the materials for the artwork was found online. Some techniques I used to create some illusion and movement in
the piece were changing the placement of the items and the opacity of the layer. The audio clips included to the animation were all chosen to create the mood that the animation gives off. Making his adventure to be random and unpredictable makes the audience ponder on about what Sir Potato is going to do next. That is the main goal for the work, along with aiming to entertain the audience with the silly story. Being a media maker to me is to create pieces that provides oneself satisfaction as well as entertainment and satisfaction to the intended audience.

Final Project

This piece by Mike Kelly consists of variety of sounds and noises mixed together in a way to create sound art. In the beginning of the piece, the volume of the noise develops in a crescendo, it gets louder. The multiple noises in the piece gets louder as it the 30 to 40 second mark. This makes it seem as if one is getting close and closer to the source of the sounds. The different sections of noise used in this piece is not necessarily pleasing to the ear, it would not be easily classified as music. There are more screeching and painful sounds within the piece.

Mike Kelly seemed to agree with Russolo because his piece has no musical harmonies included at all. Similar to what Russolo said, it is almost as if they are “fed up” with those harmonies, and include the combinations of sounds of things that we hear in our everyday lives. For example, the sounds of trolleys, horns, sirens, etc. A lot of the noises used in Mike Kelly’s piece are also noises that seem to be made from kazoos or musical instruments that one would not find in an orchestra. One can tell that it is a kazoo by the way the sound is emitted, it is like someone is blowing and pushing some force into it to emit that particular sound.

The pitches of most of the sounds are very high and it can hurt to listen to continuously. I would characterize the piece to be very loud and almost violent, due to the composition of the noises. Since all of the sounds are loud in general, being combined together at some sections of the piece, can create a very powerful and loud effect. Even though when one listens to it, it can be judged to be very loose and having no sense of structure. I think it actually does have some sort of rhythmic timing that it is following, however I’m not entirely sure.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/kelley-mccarthy.html

Digital technology is an interesting tool. In modern art, more and more artists are incorporating digital technology into their pieces. They are meshing different versions of fine arts together with digital technology. After reading this, I realized that the basic type of digital technology that is commonly used is manipulation. Even though images are manipulated through the pieces, they do not lose their original context, however they do develop a new attribute. There are other possibilities of manipulating images that drives into dematerialization of its natural aspects, as well as slightly changing the relationship between viewer, nature, and its representation.

In Joseph Scheer’s pieces: Great Tiger Moth, Ctenucha Moth, and Leopard Moth, each scanning session allows one to view a different aspect the moth. These representation of moths are created through scanning the moth and it provided a very detailed and clear image of the moth. It is clearer than how it would come out in photographic images taken by a camera. The way the artwork came out after the moth was scanned seemed very real, the texture of the moth almost seemed tangible.

Some other artists combine analogue and digital technologies into their artworks. They digitize and digitally manipulate the analogue images, the end product is demonstrated in a photograph. Having a fine arts background, I never imaged incorporating digital media into paintings before. However, Casey Williams was able to combine photography with painting. He used “less textured and nuanced quality of inkjets prints” on canvas medium, in which can be pointed out as a painterly attribute.

One point that Lev Manovich pointed out in “What is New Media?” that I found quite interesting is that the development of modern media and computers had begun around the same time. They are complementary technologies that allowed the progression for the functioning of modern mass societies. These two technologies have always existed and worked hand in hand, however it had never came to my attention until this class and reading. It just made me realize how although I live in this generation, somethings that were here since birth, I have taken for granted and not realize the importance of it.

Due to computerization, new media has general tendencies that naturally appear. The interesting point that was made is that “all new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representation.” It’s kind of like a conversion. I did not think of new media in this sense, I had not seen this relation between them. Nor did I think about how a printed photograph consists of a number of orderly dots. There was never a reason to see a photograph in that sense to begin with for me, thus I had never put it into that perspective.

I have to agree with the point that he makes about new media being interactive and the myth about it. Many people assume that interactive media is when one has to perform a physical interaction with the object. It does not necessarily have to be physical. Many interactions in regards to classical or modern art can simply be the psychological process of filling in a missing information that the artist wants the viewer to identify.