Art and Technology (JC)

This project was a slow and prodding trudge. I started on it a little late so but I figured I'd finish within a day or so. But no! It took more than 2 days and I ended up pressed for time and trying to complete it during work. Finding materials was somewhat difficult, and required resourcing for different items at Michael's. At first I planned on using small plastic, reflective things. But they were too difficult to work with, so I went with puff-balls. Also, initially I wanted to have gyarados drawn in full. As in, his entire body. But then I realized the mouth took up around half the panel, so that ambition passed quickly. Still, I'm happy about how it turned out. He's very fuzzy for a water dragon, but I think that's fine. The puff-balls worked well as an atomic entity. He also knows Hydro Pump and Bite so beware. Here it is halfway done. I've already got a good grid-set aligned by having drawn out the first part of the ear and mouth. The rest of t...

Gotta have the Frank's hot sauce. Friendship begins. I got this idea by talking to a school counselor in the Wellness Center. I was drawing spirals on the whiteboard next to me when my brain was too fried to think (I study in the wellness, sometimes). It was just a way to flush myself and relieve some stress. But she came in to get water and saw the spirals and said that when she was seven, at her grandmother's house, she would imagine a spiral in her head. And she would trace around the spiral, headed towards the center, but never reaching the center. She would get distracted or would have to talk to someone or do something. But she felt that if she reached the center, there would be some answer that would reveal herself, to herself. The spiral, she said, became a kind of motif for her throughout her life. She would tell people about it and talk about it. But one day, her friend saw a spiral in the sand, and pointed it out to her. And at the center of the...

As a kid, ASCII art was amazing and impossible to me. I was confident (at the time) that people used custom characters, or some program, or had simply drawn them and posted them as a .jpg, or that they had a computer analyze their drawing and turn it into characters. I especially thought this after completing Portal, a video game released by Valve. The end credits had a bunch of animated ASCII art. I've always wanted to create ASCII art. But every attempt is swathed by my always being too daunted, or thought there were better ways to articulate myself, or thought it was too much work unnecessarily. I think it would pose a challenge (beyond my attempt, even) to thinking about how to design something. Do you do it line by line? Do you create one object and then the others? What are the most effective ways to move your cursor around a word doc? All of these pose a challenge that is unconventional.

      The contemporary printer has made many changes and spun off in numerous different ways by a handful of companies; yet it still manages to break regularly. It's based on one of the most important technological advancements in human history, which is writing stuff down, and is also one of the oldest. You would think, after all these years, that humanity would have figured this out by now. But no. It still sucks.       The historical origin of the contemporary printer (namely, the XEROX WorkCentre 7845i) starts with a written record of anything. It starts with how man left his mark on nature in a meaningful or interesting way. Whether it was an arrangement of rocks in a river, a humble cave abode with plank wood over the entrance and cave art on the walls, or even mutilated animals in the forest. Sure, that's a scary image. But it's also pretty interesting so it counts. This eventually develops into a more advanced version which is the development of pa...

I wanted to do something I was passionate about. It's hard to explain passed that. I think this piece says a lot about my inspirations (namely Don Hertzfeldt) and also my expectations. I was honestly surprised by how fluidly it turned out. Haterz hate it but I did what I could. Hope you enjoy.

JC Ryan Professor Roundtree ART 211 9/25/17 Don Giovanni Don Giovanni truly is one of Mozart's masterpieces. Based on the historical and fictional character Don Juan, Don Giovanni follows the international womanizer as he gets into and out of trouble for his unruly escapades. Aided by Leporello, his servant and accomplice, he tricks and lies to those around him to weasel in and out of his deceptive efforts. In the end, however, Don Giovanni meets his fate when he is confronted by the Commendatore. Don Giovanni refuses to repent for his misgivings and deceptions, and is henceforth seized by demons and dragged below. Watching this opera helped me to understand the semi-destructive life of a libertine, how humor was integrated into classical operas, and why Don Giovanni has been considered a classic through the generations. Considering my knowledge of the Opera, I would confidently say that audiences who saw Don Giovanni originally presented were...

For some reason, clay-mation always succeeds in disturbing me. As a kid, I always found Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer to be highly discomforting. I don't know what it is. The shallow, grossly drawn backdrops and artificially lit settings and weird looking characters just made me feel hollow and troubled. Madama Butterfly manages to do all these things too, but in a way that is soaked in sorrow. On a positive note, I did love the music. The narrative was pretty horrible, and even worse is that this is something that has probably happened more frequently in reality than it should have. The animation was good, though. And the whole thing was very emotionally compelling. But still, the clay-mation thing. It's hard for me to get over.