Everyone’s got a friend in a band, and I’m no different. I’m happy to report that most of my friends’ bands are pretty good. I created the image above for Meeting in the Aisle (you should follow them @mitaisle or www.facebook.com/MeetingInTheAisle). They happen to be a Radiohead tribute band and they are insanely good. Sure, it’s fun to hear a band cover “Creep” for the billionth time, but I’ve seen these boys rock out “National Anthem” with a horn section at The North Star Bar. Nut-so indeed!
I wanted to take a look back at these “portraits” I created of each member of the band. Now that the Fall semester has officially began, it’s great to be back in the classroom and be able to show my students the cool stuff you can do with really low-end technology. These images were made with my Mom’s crappy all-in-one Hewlett-Packard scanner, copier, printer. So although it looks like I applied some weird noise-inducing filter, the rainbow lined markings you see in the image are just the digital artifacts left behind from a crappy scanner. Most scanners – especially an all-in-one like my Mom’s – is designed to just pick up flat images like pictures and documents on the surface of the glass. So when you put three-dimensional objects on the scanner – in this case a person’s head – weird stuff can happen. Super weird and fun stuff!
This is Karl, he is the Thom Yorke of Meeting in the Aisle. He does a very nice Thom-style dance thing that you need to see.
Check out this amazing detail.
Some scanners can pick up amazing amounts of detail. I’m what you might call a scanner expert. Below is another scanner composition, from a series I am developing called Buzz Bomb. “Buzz Bomb” was the colloquial name given to the German V-1 flying bomb rockets of World War II. These bombs and their more advanced descendent the V-2 rocket were equipped with auto-pilot guidance systems, so they did not require the vision of an individual bomber. This has nothing to do with Radiohead or Meeting in the Aisle, but hopefully you appreciate the technique none-the-less.
In conclusion, you should check out Meeting in the Aisle’s next show on October 2nd at The North Star Bar. It’s the 10th anniversary of Radiohead’s Kid A album and Meeting in the Aisle will be playing it from start to finish! What’s better, my man friend who runs Atop An Elephant Design creates all of MitA’s super cool posters. Here’s the brand new poster for the upcoming show:
In December of 2009, I surprised my man-friend with a trip to Las Vegas. Vegas is total spectacle and if you’ve ever been, you know that even the airport is full of glitz, glamour and slot machines. Norman Klein has written a history of special effects entitled The Vatican to Vegas – you should check it out. During this trip, we were lucky enough to visit The Neon Museum, also affectionately called the neon boneyard. And that is is – just piles of old neon signs, as if Scorsese used them up and dismantled them right after filming Casino. If you’re ever out in Vegas, I highly recommend checking out The Neon Museum – but make sure to schedule a tour in advance because they book up fast!
Being that the man-friend and I are total font geeks, the mix of typography and bold graphics was truly exciting.
I couldn’t help but adjust these for that slightly-desaturated, sepia-toned look that just screams desert. Too much?
In the right side of the photo, you’ll see a piece from the original Stardust Hotel and Casino sign. The way you see it in this image, the piece is laying on its side. The entire Stardust sign takes up about one entire mile of the boneyard. How cool is that?
What is Foto Friday? I post a photograph (or a bunch of photographs) every Friday. Let me know what you think!
Tank Man 20 is a collaborative project I organized last year at Tyler School of Art. Over 90 first year students enrolled in Foundation Computers participated in the creation of the piece. 2009 marked 20 years since the events at Tiananmen Square took place. I thought it fitting that a new generation of students should reflect on the role that the media played in the creation and proliferation of such an iconic image – that of the tank man. Also, I wasn’t surprised to learn that many of my students were unaware of the events at Tianenmen Square. They did recognize “tank man” as an important cultural reference.
The first step was to screen a really great documentary created by PBS for Frontline in 2006. The entire program is available to watch online and it’s really fascinating! After the screening, it was up to the students to remix and remake the tank man image in whatever way they saw fit. The students were aware of the ultimate goal, that their single image would be chopped up into a grid and presented in an ever-rotating online presentation of all 90+ images.
The end result is an ever-changing flash animation in which over 1,800 images are pulled to reformulate the tank man image. The online project can be viewed at www.TankMan20.com. Each student’s individual piece can also be viewed under the credits section which links to every complete image. Jessica Lee, a student enrolled in one of my Fall 2009 courses created one of my favorite remakes. Her simple technique of erasing out of the tanks and the unidentifiable tank man to an all-but ghost image is really effective. It makes me think of events and how they are remembered and reinterpreted through our later understanding of them. Tatyana Grechina, also enrolled in one of my courses, remade the image using a beautiful mix of three-dimensional and two-dimensional textiles.
I was walking the dog today and thinking about how exciting it is that more and more people are using the technology they have available to them to create and share digital images and video. Then I got depressed thinking about how despite having access to more and more technology, not many people understand some of the basic concepts of digital imagery. Clearly, I’m easily depressed. The main concept that I don’t think most people outside of the design/art/education field understand is that of resolution.
As an adjunct instructor (I don’t meant to brag, really) of electronic media and foundation level computer classes, I lecture for about 3 hours each semester to every class on resolution. I somehow make up for this painstakingly meticulous process by watching funny YouTube videos afterwards. Understanding what pixel resolution really is and how to manipulate and manage it is an extremely important tool for artists and designers, but even more so for amateur photographers and also, my Mom – who continues to print images directly from Facebook.
Resolution Myth #1: Low Resolution = Bad Quality
This idea could not be more wrong. And yet, people like to say “oh, the resolution is too low” as if that’s the same as “oh, that’s just a crappy picture”. Every image I have posted on this blog so far has been set at a low resolution, because screens (and therefore the interwebs and its browsers) don’t NEED a lot of information. Screen resolution requires the smallest amount of pixels (72 pixels for every inch of the image), so that’s why web graphics and our Facebook images pop up quickly while still looking great! Low resolution can therefore imply low quantity (of pixels that is), but not necessarily low quality.
Resolution Myth #2: Online Images Can’t Be Printed
So the interwebs doesn’t need that much information (again, think quantity of pixels) but we’ve already countered the first myth that low resolution images (e.g. web images) are lower quality. The problem with trying to print most web images is that while screens/the interwebs need a small amount of pixels to show great-looking pictures, desktop printers that you have at home need more information. If you try to print out someone’s picture from Facebook, it’s going to look crappy. But that doesn’t mean that ALL pictures online can’t be printed. It really comes down to the question “how big can I print it?”
Let’s break down some image sizes. The image below is a scan of a painting of my Grandmother; wasn’t she gorgeous?
The ORIGINAL image size breaks down as the following:
Dimensions in inches: 8″ by 10.667″
Dimensions in pixels: 1200 px by 1600 px
Resolution: 150 ppi
For resolution newbies, ppi stands for “pixels per inch”. Learn it, live it! 150 ppi is a good starting point for printing images yourself. You don’t want to go any lower than 150 ppi. So I can print out this image 8″ by 10.667″ and it will look stunning.
General Myth #1: Lady Gaga is Avante-Garde
Now let’s move on to this image I found on the web.
I’ve resized the Lady Gaga image for posting on this blog, of course. Many of my students are crazy-obsessed with Lady Gaga and this is something I’m still trying to figure out… but I digress. If you’d like to get the original image and use it as a wallpaper on your ‘puter, you can find it here.
The ORIGINAL image size breaks down as the following:
Dimensions in inches: 16.667″ by 22.222″
Dimensions in pixels: 1200 px by 1600 px
Resolution: 72 ppi
So the pixel dimensions of both images are the same!! The only thing that differs between these two images – other than taste and personal preference of course – is the inch dimensions and the resolution. What this all basically means is that the Lady Gaga image can be resized to 150 ppi for printing, but in doing that, the inch dimensions much decrease. We can’t print her at the original inch dimensions which were slightly larger than 16″ by 22″.
Resolution is determined by the amount of PIXELS PER INCH; so if we distribute the pixels across fewer inches (e.g. from 16.667″ by 22.222″ to 8″ by 10.667″) we produce a higher resolution. So regardless of the origin of an image, the thing that really matters is the pixel dimensions and not necessarily the original resolution.
So in conclusion, I too cry pink tears over the misuse of the term “low resolution” and dream of a future world in which everyone – including my Mom – will understand how to manage their image resolution correctly! Also, if you’ve managed to find this blog post, I’d be happy to help anyone resize their images – just send me an email.
The title of this post means “I can’t speak German”. I was fortunate enough to travel to Germany TWICE in 2009. I am a lucky, lucky girl. This photograph was taken inside an S-Bahn (subway) station in Berlin. The weird turquoise tile reminds me of kitchens in America during the 1950s; plus the advertisements are amazing!
What it is about transit maps that are so graphically beautiful? I can’t remember the exact station, but it was somewhere in this general area, near the Zoologischer Garten station:
What is Foto Friday? I post a photograph every Friday. Let me know what you think!
As an amateur seamstress, I always find myself with extra swatches of fabric that I have no use for – most of the times because they are too small or oddly shaped. I recently used some extra fabric from IKEA to create a wall piece for above my sewing area. The IKEA fabrics are great for futon covers, pillows, curtains, or even fun tote bags. You can check out all of their fabrics here. The only bummer about buying the fabric is finding someone in their giant maze of a store to cut it for you. But, it’s worth the wait!
To make this wall piece, I first removed the canvas from an old painting stretcher. I then wrapped the fabric around the stretcher and stapled the fabric down to the back of the stretcher bars. Use a staple gun and ask a friend to help hold the stretcher steady. You want to make sure that the fabric is stretched really tightly. You can also just buy a pre-made stretcher without canvas, like this one here. And voila, just hang as you would normally hang a painting. For the wall piece above, I also added an additional piece of fabric. I cut one of the flowers out of the IKEA fabric and simply pinned it onto the piece with fancy straight pins.
With smaller pieces of fabric, you can use small stretchers or line a shadowbox like in the image below. I used two different fabric types in 9″ x 12″ shadow boxes that I painted lime green. A.C. Moore carries inexpensive unfinished shadow boxes that you can paint or stain yourself. Use a staple gun to affix the fabric inside the boxes. I loosely attached the fabric inside the boxes, to create a sense of depth inside the boxes.
The new site for Sunset Entertainment Group is functioning entirely through WordPress and it was an exciting process. For any web-tech geeks out there, you might appreciate the implementation of the Jquery UI accordion component on the clients and sunset artists pages. The accordion slider not only organizes the large amount of information in a really nice, condensed way, it also adds some extra movement and interest on the page.
Mad Men is back with season 4. The man-friend and I have been crazy fans since Season 1. I was so excited to see this premiere knowing it would start sometime in 1964. The younger characters are getting more mod with every minute that goes by, and it’s so exciting. In the season premiere, I spotted a poster for Helvetica in the general work area of the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce office. See it there in the right hand corner? Try not to be distracted by the fact that Peggy is wearing a straight skirt and is drinking a cocktail.
The font showed up later in the scandalously modern Jantzen swimsuit ad. In short, loving Mad Men season 4!
My good friends at Fiber Ink Studio recently printed images for an upcoming Alumni & Faculty show at Tyler School of Art. They were printed beautifully because Fiber Ink Studio owners Lesly Deschler Canossi and Andrew Buckland are meticulous when it comes to color and print quality.
Check out the previous post on their website design.
The images above were taken during my time at Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. I was lucky enough to visit Germany twice in 2009 as part of the Walters Traveling Fellowship I received in 2008.
In August, a new site for Fiber Ink Studio launched. Fiber Ink is the product of a collaboration between my two good friends Andrew Buckland and Lesly Deschler-Canossi. After meeting both Andrew and Lesly during our tenure as students in the Graduate Photography Program at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art), we have become close friends. I was lucky to design personal portfolio sites for both Andrew and Lesly; Lesly’s new site launched just this past Summer as well as Fiber Ink.
Based in New York City, Fiber Ink Studio offers affordable, high-quality digital prints on a range of fine-art archival papers. As artists, Lesly and Andrew’s commitment to quality and color management is unmatched. For more information, contact info@FiberInkStudio.com.