UCA Week 5: Fine Art, ’Metamorphosis’ Brief
Introduction
The work I’ve been making has been directly inspired by my own experience, as I’ve tried to weave in elements of my OCD.
Shapes on two pages
We were told to place object on a page in whatever way we felt made sense, repeating the exercise on two halves of a folded a4 sheet.
My second composition is actually on the right. Viewed from that angle, the work eventually seemed to me like a 2 frame animation, with the objects involved in a sort of explosion, moving apart from one another from their overlapped configuration. It was interesting to think from a purely compositional perspective.
3 contrasting elements
The first day involved making a series of A3 sheets in three groups: the darkest we can make, colour pattern, and drawings.
I used collage and Indian ink to make the dark sheet.
And then drew a set a pair flower patterns with bright oil pastels.
Colour Workshop
When looking at a colour wheel, we were told to explore what combinations of primaries attracted us the most, and instructed to make our own palette or wheel following those colours we liked.
This meant starting with primaries, as well as some non primaries, and mixing pairs together, as a group.
In our group i was interested in getting as close as possible to the neutral gray I could, but the imperfect nature of the ‘primaries’ we were using meant a series of shifted greys, towards green, blue and red. A member of my group then started experimenting with copying the patterns we had made onto other sheets using wet tissue.
I attempted to photocopy a sheet, to break the colours back down using chromatography, but the photocopy inks weren’t water soluble and this path failed. We decided in the end to blend all the colours on the sheet using a damp roller. This is the final result:
When fully mixed the colours come together to form a more textural image, with less contrast and depth. The obfuscation is one way, as the water can’t be taken away again, the process was destructive.
Artist Research
Julian Stanczak
The op art of Julian Stanczak, sometimes representing bodies of water or other abstractions, is something I found visually very powerful, as he creates clean line colour art using manual techniques.
'Datenwerk - Mensch’ (‘Data Presentation/Art - Man’), Richard Kriesche
The 7 part ’self portrait’ by Richard Kriesche, visualising the data of part of his sequenced DNA, inspired my to try to mirror some elements of myself into the work, namely my ticks. His use of digital media also informed my use of glitch art.
’One Hundred Live and Die’, Bruce Nauman
The directly powerful text of this work by Bruce Nauman is inspirational for the lack of ambiguity in the work’s message. The word pairings are clear and contrast visually with one another through his use of bright neon.
Glitch Art
I decided I wanted to incorporate elements of glitch art into my work, inspired by reading through articles on the website animalswithinanimals.com, to reflect the obstructive and destructive nature of tics. I started with this video, editing it in photoshop, and exporting it in gif format.
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add these as html cards right before publishing, then remove this message :)
The first step was colour manipulation, so, inspired by this, I took a colour table from an nes console and replaced the original table, giving this result.
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I decided to push the distortion further, and attempted to edit the original video code in plaintext, an easy way to damage files for corrupted results, but was limited by software available on university hardware and decided to use other effects instead. A popular one is applying pixel sorting, an method that transforms the data within an image following a sorting algorithm.
This effect was available within photoshop, so I created these two gifs.
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The second has more applied distortion:
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I decided to apply the same effects to the ‘3 contrasting’ images from before, and was able to access a friend’s laptop to use a pixel sorting tool for still images.
I liked the abstraction, the final results looked more like aerial images of riverbeds or beaches than patterns. The distortion (for me) could be mapped onto the distortion of reality caused by strange or broken ways of thinking.
Next I wanted to animate the text from the previous work I had made. I made a simple frame by frame animation using photoshop again.
View post on imgur.comI then applied the same distortion effects, after converting the project to a smart object (making it possible to apply filters to the whole project as if it were a single layer).
View post on imgur.comBy converting the frame animation to a timeline project, the project exports as a video, converting all the frames into clips. This made them more fluid, and made the effect more ‘real’ as it is applied differently to each of the 30 frames per second.
View post on imgur.comI returned to the video from the car, and applied a new effect, this time a video manipulation effect where certain frames essential to the compression process are corrupted or removed, so that there are movement frames without the reference frames, and the frames start to overlap.
View post on imgur.comI decided to combine my imagery into a single video, the distortion covering a broad range of inputs. My original plan had been again, to use a hex editor to break the video, applying increasing levels of distortion as the video progressed to represent a slow breakdown. As this wasn’t possible I just layered the imagery I had used into a composite, and hoped to be able to solve this later, something that didn’t end up being possible before the deadline.
View post on imgur.comI enjoyed the abstract distortion element to this project, and would have liked to spend more time on this. The conceptual link to OCD is something I also would have liked to have strengthened.
