Art and Democracy

I'm feeling pretty artsy tonight. I just came from a seminar at the HFAC by Gregory Manchess, an incredible and quite famous illustrator that has been a guest lecturer today on our BYU campus. His work is adventurous, grandiose, and all about the human spirit. Here's one of my favorites:

 

With all this talk of democracy, it gets me thinking about how the government affects artists.

We live in a time and place in which democracy and communication are so vastly interlinked. In the art world, there couldn't be more freedom. But we didn't get there overnight. Not but a century ago, classical art was the only respected form and the art world was much more elitist and aristocratic than it is today. 

Art is a reflection on history, is it not? Yes, because the artists are always giving a bit of themselves into the pieces they show. Even if that bit of themselves is imprisoned by the status quo or limitation of speech...they are still showing that even if they are not displaying what they really want to express as an artist. For example, Leonarda Da Vinci, a beloved artist, was always commissioned to due religious grandiose art, but was quite the godless man himself. Yet his lovely works display the mantra and thought process of that time period, whether or not they were his interest.

Here's a brief blog entry about Art and Democracy: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/apr/06/art-democracy-general-election.

I found it to be relevant to our discussion and assignment.

Consume, Create, Connect: A Midterm Reflection

CONSUME: I feel as if most of my time was spent here. I mean we attended lectures, But I think that’s supposed to be the way it is. Think about how much information the average student gets at BYU, and how much information they actually put out. I feel as long as our minds are constantly going through that healthy process of sifting through ideas, the consumption of knowledge is a good thing.

-Browsing Blogs: I’m an illustration major, and one of my favorite past times already is checking out the french illustration blogs, where young artists are putting out some incredible stuff. However, my knowledge of non-art blogs is significantly smaller, and having teachers, classmates, and diigo to help us find some of those was really neat. Some of my favorites since this class started: 

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/ - good for catching up with the US’s economy.

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/ - Talking Head singer David Byrne’s travel blog. Extremely cool and just really neat posts.
http://digitalcivilization.blogspot.com - I hate to sound like a sycophant, but this truly was a great source for our themes.

And many more.

-Google Reader: The fact that my whole class was automatically put under a folder without me having to organize things was awesome. Learning how to use this and to look up key topics quickly with the search bar has been enlightening.

-Printmaking: I especially connected to the historical content about Martin Luther. He was an inspiring leader and such a voice of reason in a time of so much religious oppression. It also helps that I’m learning all about printmaking right now, so I had a great time being very involved in this process and posting about it.

CREATE: To create is my purpose, my passion. I love the power of creating visual imagery more than anything else, and I have been putting these creations on my illustration blog for sometime already, so there was definitely some things I had background on already. However, this class had me look at different ways of creating meaningful media and blog posts.

-Embedding videos: I didn’t know how to do this before, so having a class where I wanted to make my assignments more interesting necessitated that I look it up and know how to do this once and for all.

-Garage Band: With my new mac, I know there are many tools and systems that if I simply was acquainted with, I could try some cool things. David Potter was one of my partners for the group activities, and he taught me how to use Apple’s Garage Band audio recording system. I successfully learned how to create track and to use the instruments on garage band! It was pretty streamlined and simple, but I wouldn’t have taken the time to learn it without this tutorial!

-Also, I have created and scanned in some of my own illustration work to show students and have created topics relevant to them.

CONNECT:

-Posting: The largest part of my time was spent consuming and creating, but only because those steps were necessary to get a good blog entry out there. I tend to like looser blog posts, than ones that stick firmly with the subject, so I’m glad that Dr. Zappala and Dr. Burton encouraged this. I would attend lectures, write notes, and brainstorm ideas by looking through our class websites and looking through some of the blogs I knew of. I always decided on a post that I had very real interest. For example, I am taking an intaglio printmaking class, so I am creating

-Diigo: I know this part of the learning might seem to fit under connect, but I feel as if this is a good create system for me. I can create these links and put my own systems. I have added a few of these links relating to our class and just for the heck of it as well. I will even continue to use Diigo for my own personal use after this class. 

-Comments: I received some good comments and followed up with them in conversation, which helped me feel as if I was integrating myself more into the digital blogging world, and understanding the very real connections and growth of knowledge that can happen here. Students have been making some great comments, recommending sites or prompting new ideas for me.

I know this isn’t part of the prompt, but I’d like to think about my future expectations for the class. I feel like this first section of the class was a bit of testing the water. The class expectations were defined in some ways, but in some ways looser, so I think this time around I will have a little bit more of an idea of what I should be looking for and boomarking to, posting about, etc. I really do believe that I can incorporate my life more often and make this blog entry more of a few times a week thing rather than just every time the assignment is due.I am taking a creative writing class, so I plan to post some of my poems on this blog, and I have learned how to write more effectively in that class, and hope to carry it on to Tame Sequels!

Something from Nothing

Everyone's giving out free stuff on the internet these days. Search Engines, Music, Books, Apps, you name it, it's free.


So....if everyone's giving out free goods, does that mean that people will stop earning money and our economy will suffer? Me? I believe that our economy will definitely change, and certain industries will change radically in the way they earn money, but I believe that people will just find other sources of income. I predict that the main source of income will become advertising in this new era. We are going to find industries related to web-based advertising are the strongest in the burst of this new technological based work era.


For example, I have a family member who works for a company that boosts the profiles of businesses on the internet. How does the company do this, you might ask? By making blogs that receive hits on google and putting links to the company on those blogs.
Here's her blog as an example:


http://minba.wordpress.com/


I personally believe that the economy will be fine. People will only spend time on free things if they have motivation to do so. If the economy takes a drop and people are worried about their jobs, then free software will decrease as much as necessary. Laissez-faire. As long as there is a decent balance between supply and demand, and people are still producing the kinds of things people want to buy/use, we cannot deny the technological progress, the free software. We are more likely to cripple ourselves from lack of progression than from too much of a good thing, in my opinion. I do not wish to oversimplify this, but I do know that people who work hard and come up with good, innovative products will often, if not always, find rewards.

Coloring Art on Photoshop.

Ever wonder how ads and illustrations have those cool graphicky solid colors in them?
Meet photoshop.


I recently posted a piece on my illustration blog called "monkey and cat":

This piece is simple in appearance. Its coloring process was fairly elemental as an illustrator, yet to achieve this screenprint color effect, I have had to understand the fundaments of photoshop. Here is a screenshot of the image in photoshop. Note that there are a good amount of layers that are present in the sidebar (For those inexperience with Photoshop, they are the little thin rows on the right).

Here is a basic step-by-step of what I had to do to accomplish this:

1. I drew the traditional ink lineart on paper with a micron pen.
2. I scanned in the image using Epson Photoscanner.
3. I opened up the file in photoshop, flipped it, cropped it, and edited it to get the lines crisp and ready for color.
4. I cut the black lineart out against the white background, and pasted it onto a transparent layer (Think of your teacher's old overhead sheets. Its like that.)
5. I colored a transparent layer underneath and set it under the lineart, so that the lines aren't covered with digital paint.
6. I adjusted the hue and saturation to meet my standards.
7. I messed with settings and layers and saved the file as a .jpg.

Voila! Monkey and Cat. (It's technically a baboon.)

GLOSSARY-

Layers- Layers in photoshop are like transparencies stacked one on top of one another. Each layer can have different images and effects. When the layers are stacked, the images appear as if they are all a single image.

Algorithms of Thought.

Wow, indeed, Homer. Wow, indeed.

How small we are. And we are surprised when things happen that prove our latest and greatest theories false. Those meddling Galileo and Darwin sorts are always messing things up! Time, Metabolism, Evolution, Ptolemaic Theory, These are all words conveying systems people use to try and harness the way this world really works and put it into a place that he can control and manipulate for his desires. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." We are incredibly complex computers--with insight of our existence. We know who we are. We, generally know what we want--happiness. Through our experiences and minds we decide how we are going to find happiness. Not all of us are successful. But we are all self-interested, unlike the modern computers we know today.

Even my proclaiming things to you is a self-interested act. The "theater" idol comes onto the stage, (NPI) I can only hope to find that my ideas receive some sort of recognition of truth, and that I am thought of in a higher manner by my teachers and fellow bloggers. Every human being does what they do for self worth--whether it is helping others or being a ruthless dictator, self interest and bias is at hand. Let it be noted that "self-interest" and "selfishness" are often different things.

Do we see some sort of gap between human and computer knowledge? My theory is that there is some sort of way of creating life that we will always continue to reach for in this world, but will never achieve. Computers are not at the bottom of this chain, because like we have discussed in class, search engines have the capability of gathering data and completing work that would take our human minds' years. But there is some sort of lower world we created in computers, one that can accomplish many great things, but will never truly emulate the complexities of the human brain.

Google is Watching You

I feel I should bring up the question again that I had today in class. "Will my Xanga blog posts from middle school be read a hundred years from now or will they be obselete?" Reworded into a bigger question, it would sound like,
"Can the internet be considered a place to store long-term information?" 

As we discussed earlier, this question is up in the air. There is something so solid and real about printed material. Things in the virtual world may not be "recaptured" after many years and loss of bandwidth or whatever (I am no expertise or even amateur in the world of computer science, so this "bandwidth" idea may be completely irrevelant)


And can we bring in the whole "Nationalism, Empire, and Monarchy" theme to this? I submit that we can:

If Google, Inc., the number one search engine that is used, has access to all of this information about our lives, are we already being forced into an open government deal?


Google-watch.org says, "At another level, it's a struggle over who will have the predominant influence over the massive amounts of user data that Google collects. In the past, discussions about privacy issues and the web have been about consumer protection. That continues to be of interest, but since 9/11 there is a new threat to privacy -- the federal government. Google has not shown any inclination to declare for the rights of its users across the globe, as opposed to the rights of the spies in Washington who would love to have access to Google's user data."


To tie these two things together, I think that as a nation, and even as a world, there has to be some sort of agreement made regarding huge international internet based indexers like Google, and their powers in the affairs of human's rights to privacy. At the same time there has to be some sort of way of knowing where our information is stored, and for how long it will be available on the internet before we need to erase it. 


Another concern that I will raise is this:
What if Google's owners takes advantage of its situation and starts making threats to erase the data of those who get in there way?


Does anyone else see this as a potential problem? Or am I missing some major point that makes this a benign threat? Perhaps yahoo and the other search engine competition could keep everything in check? Give me your thoughts!

N-three-P

 That's what Michael Scott called the ever popular and widespread music format of the mp3 on the hit show The Office. He was a little digitally illiterate.

I just recently was in the multimedia lab of the library, learning a basic tutorial of garage band via fellow classmate David Potter. This was useful to me, as I recently switched to a mac from windows and I am eager to learn all of its creative tools. I am an illustration major, so I don't use audio tools quite as often as photoshop, but I do enjoy creating music as a hobby (I've always fiddled around with the piano and violin. When I say fiddled, I mean I don't read music at all.)

As an illustration major, I have learned to apply my skills through the online use of photoshop. Therefore, It's only natural in our technological age, that there is a digital counterpart to traditional music. I learned that garage band functions in ways somewhat similar to photoshop: Layers are a main tool, and you can save the file in different forms (AAP or MP3). When I first was experimenting with my new macbook, I tried to open up garage band as someone with no experience, and found myself a little confused. David explained how to use the system's keyboard even if you don't own a keyboard to plug-in, to use the wide array of instruments on the program.You can even plug in instruments and make vocal recordings using the program.

Using the vocal recording option and layers on Garage Band.

 To tie this in with our theme of protestant reformation, I think we can look at the recent history of music within the last few decades. We discussed this a bit in class, but the age of music sharing has been here for a solid decade now, and in a way, the widespread music can be compared to the widespread use of the Bible with Martin Luther's efforts. Maybe Shawn Fannin, creator of Napster, is like music's Martin Luther. I know religion and music are a bit different (Although, to some people they are synonymous), but I vaguely remember my dad, a bona fide music junkie, so excited to download one single song in 10 minutes. Now a days where we have torrents and sites in which we can upload music (youtube, beemp3, imeem, myspace music, etc), everyone is able to access their favorite artists and be in the "know" of what is cool just by clicking on a link or a play button that gives us the music in seconds. 

Cool Stuff. And if I were really into Garage band, its nice to know that I have the option of creating music via layers and recordings and keyboards on the program, and then exporting it as an .mp3 on my hard drive, and then uploading it to myspace and potentially becoming the new Justin Bieber. I'd be living the dream...

Intaglio Printmaking

Fancy that printmaking is the theme.

This semester, my "indulgent" class is an elective called "Intaglio" printmaking.

This is something that I have had real interest in for a while. It is a sort of printmaking that has been used for ages. Among some of the famous intaglio printmakers:

-Albrecht Durer

-Rembrandt

-John Taylor

-Daniel Hopfer

The process is quite difficult and lengthy.

1.You must first take a copper plate and degrease it of all human oils.

2.You must cover it with a solvent of beeswax

3.You must carve an image into the beeswax.

4. You must place the piece into acid for about an hour, depending on the piece.

5. You must scrape off the beeswax and apply ink.

6. You must use an expensive printing press that can press all that ink into the paper.

So why am I doing this? Why do I choose this process which easily takes double the hours of using photoshop?

Because its cool. And different. And something to discover.

Here is me, excited about my first beeswax carving:

Here is my first amateur print (of birds, an obsession I will post about at a later time):

"Never badmouth synergy!"

One of my favorite teachers at Brigham Young University, illustrator Robert Barrett said something quite profound once during a class, 


"Those who really live life leave the stuff that is art."


I remember that it hit a real note with me and I have always kept that quote in mind when deciding how to use my time. Cicero had quite the critique from Petrarch. But I think the things that were said were very interesting coming from a humanist. I would like to think that latter-day saints strive to be humanists. I mean who doesn't want progression and education in Zion? But to be successful in being a humanist, well, it doesn't have so much to do with sheer hard work as much as it has to do with the basic ability we have develop to balance our lifes--and maybe "synergize" (Jack Donaghy would be so proud--30 rock fans please stand up?) those two different parts of our lives together to set examples for others.


In the illustration world, there is the well-revered Norman Rockwell, of whom I'm sure most non-art majors have heard of in their american history classes or something. This guy was ridiculously talented. His work had humor, charm, depth, technical mastery. I just saw an art exhibit with a bunch of his work in D.C. sponsored by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and these paintings are absolutely beautiful in person.

"School Teacher" - One of the lovely heart-warming pieces I saw in D.C.

His personal life? Well according to The Berkshire Eagle's "Portrait of Norman Rockwell",  
"Married three times, he was a caring but distant husband and father who spent years in therapy dealing with loneliness and depression....[He] painted happiness, but didn't live it."


A link to the article: A portait of Norman Rockwell


Would Rockwell have been as great as he was had he taken more family time to develop those domestic relationships?


The question is--does there have to be a real strain on our personal life in order for us to change the world? I don't believe so. Can we use technology such as youtube and blogs to make it easier for us to reach "the world" and still maintain a good family life?
To me, it rings true that the two can and should be balanced for us to become someone who really makes  a solid impact on the world and on the people in our lives. (Technology or not)

"What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions?" -Petrarch

I really hope no one writes a posthumous letter like that to me.

The Naming of Things

Hello! Welcome to my blog for the Honors Seminar Class: Survey of Digital Technology. 

My name is Madeline, I am an illustration major and french minor. I love foxes, indian food, studying peoples' faces, running, Joanna Newsom, creative writing, and all things lovely. I actually have another regular art blog, if you ever want to check it out. I post illustrative work and amateur photography on there about once a week. 

http://ididnotdrawthis.blogspot.com

I'm gonna be honest, I just kind of signed up for this class because it looked mildly interesting and it fit my schedule like a glove. As I am setting up my blog and everything, I am getting more enthusiastic about it. It seems like there are a lot of ways to be creative with blog posts.

Okay, this isn't a real "technological" post, but my blog looked so empty, so I thought I'd explain the name. Geez, I wish it was really interesting, but its not. I had to order books off of Amazon and there's this way of paying for things on amazon these days by entering a "PayPhrase." There's a random word generator and "tame sequels" was one of the options. (No, I didn't take it, so don't try and buy your textbooks with it, silly.) For some reason, I just loved the way that sounded. It had a poetic air about it and wrote it down in my journal instantly. It just rolls of the tongue nicely, "tame sequels." Plus, this is a sequel blog. So, it fit. 


Just so I can make this a legit post, here's a wall street journal article that talks about the new "PayPhrase" option on Amazon: 

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/10/29/will-you-remember-your-payphrase/

    Here's a good quote, "Although there are seemingly infinite potential combinations, the problem might be that we humans just aren’t sufficiently creative. Amazon automatically generates some inadvertently hilarious suggestions for people when they sign up for a PayPhrase. (For us, Amazon has suggested “Ingrained Abhorrence,” “Enthusiastic Disdain” and “Turn Down Oven.”) Williams said the suggestions aren’t unique to a specific person, and come from Amazon’s efforts to scour tons of books for popular phrases."


Also, blogger is having a hard time listening to my formatting rules, so sorry if this is all spaced a little weird.