rwagstaff

Ryan Wagstaff



I am a senior studying Biology and minoring in Public Health. While I've been using computers for a lot of my life, I don't have very much experience using photoshop or other editing tools beyond Microsoft paint. I don't have much art experience with regards to painting and images, but I did play a lot of classical piano before I came to college and really enjoyed it. Some interesting things about me is that my family has quite a few musicians in it, and my cousin was the sound technician for Nirvana for much of the band's career.

My artistic interests are pretty varied. I really enjoy going to the national gallery of art and especially like to focus on the landscape portraits, I enjoy the dramatic scenes and minute details in them. With more contemporary art, I really enjoy digitally produced pieces through methods such as databending, glitch art, and ASCII graphics.

__Response to copyright comic__

I found this comic to be very entertaining and useful. The public poorly understands copyright laws and the system has become even more convoluted in recent years, as the authors explain. Despite this, they do a great job explaining by use of a comic book presentation, and effectively summarize a lot of legal proceedings. Its usefulness is especially relevant because of recent copyright acts targeting the digital world (the most infamous one being SOPA) that have a very direct impact on the normal web user. Even on Google and YouTube, we can see notifications that certain results and videos have been removed due to laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Reading this article has helped me grasp the legal mechanisms and grounds for which these claims are made, and also perhaps why video-sharing websites are so aggressive in their copyright infringement policies.

Maybe one of the most relevant cases of intellectual property that I can remember is A&M Records vs. Napster. Despite only being 7 years old when it shut down, I remember my brother using it very often and how much music he downloaded from the site. At the time, the shutdown of Napster seemed highly controversial because it seemed as though people disagreed on whether or not its existence benefitted the music industry. Similar to what the comic described, a lot of amateur musicians benefited from Napster and its loose connections to piracy. Even though it was easy to abuse the website for copyrighted mainstream music, its popularity and lax content sharing allowed early musicians to widely distribute their music and gain popularity, ultimately benefitting them in the long run. However, corporations and artists signed on to major labels seemed to not agree with the website’s existence. Even after reading the comic, I’m not convinced that shutting down Napster was a bad decision. After seeing how Napster was used, there was definitely a lot of music stolen through the website that would have otherwise resulted in sales for the original artists. The website has seemed to have been a significant influence on later services such as Pandora and iTunes, and also popular torrenting websites. Despite being in a legal and moral grey area, Napster changed music distribution to what it is today. Middle grounds seem to have been found (and grown wildly popular), by allowing consumers to either purchase single songs instead of entire albums or listen to music with the occasional audio advertisement.

I also think that Napster is the most relevant case because it’s also closest to when this comic book was made: 2006. I would like to see if the narrative would be different if this book had been written in 2016, as copyright laws have become more and more controversial. Has the balance in what’s protected gone back in favor of the creators, or have we continued to constrict through overprotection? There seems to be a distinct lack of commentary on the Internet and whether or not its current state is too lax on its protection of intellectual property.

Early photoshops











__Surrealist Composite Progress__

Original image



Final, colorized image. While the boots were colorized, I eventually deleted those layers due to realizing it would be easier and more realistic to warp his legs into a horse image that already had some riding boots on it from a different rider.



Warping legs into pre-existing boots on horse



Unaltered background picture with my hand cut in



Background blurred at different layers, slight blur added to proximal hand, shadows on hand improved to give it a more 'outdoors' look



Combined horse and man image put 'on top' of hand, I created a new layer of my hand to cover the bottom of the horse's legs



Cinemagraph



Final image. The bird was given a little more context to make it look less out of place but maintain the surrealism in the piece. Additionally, the blur on the bird was altered slightly and the top of the picture was expanded

Are there certain aspects of Augmented Reality you consider especially interesting for future experiments and explorations?

I would say the most exciting aspect of augmented reality is the level with which it will be integrated into our lives. I mean this not in the sense that we will simply have it, but I believe it will be so prolific that the next generation in modern society will shutter at the very thought of living in, say, the 2000s. This is similar to how many millenials from the 1990s would shutter at the thought of life before the Internet. There are certain inventions that redefine modern society, such as cars, phones, and so forth. The thought of us once again being on the brink of one is in and of itself exciting.

In many ways, augmented reality has already been here for some time. As with many technologies, one could argue that world militaries have been using augmented reality for some time now. In the 1960s, militaries developed technology to display on a fighter pilot’s visor. This technology has lead to new levels of integration between pilots and their aircraft. Simply looking in a different direction can, for example, cause the aircraft’s computer to scan for potential targets where the pilot is looking. Visors can display calligraphic symbols that either stay in a fixed position on the visor, or stay next to outside world entities as the pilot moves their head. It is worth

These technologies, while originally driven for the purposes of war, are already having dramatic effects as they are slowly introduced into the civilian world. The possibilities for improving our daily lives and making tasks more efficient are both exciting and daunting. This is a technology that can, by definition, warp the way we perceive reality. There are many possibilities for this technology to greatly improve our lives, the way we express ourselves, and the way we communicate with others. Just as easily, it could also be used for more dystopian purposes. What is most likely is that both could happen simultaneously, as we see with social networking and also the Internet privacy movement.

Needless to say, the future of Augmented Reality is exciting. It is difficult to outline any single exploration that artists, inventors, and consumers could take. There are applications in, for example, learning. Rather than simply reading a chemistry textbook to learn about molecules, one could simultaneously read about a reaction as they watch it happen in front of them. In medicine, a physician could be able to diagnose what is wrong with a patient before they even come to the clinic. Artists can now show perspectives and communicate through a medium previously unexplored; entire books could be written that simply spit out possible suggestions and ideas. Though Augmented Reality is very much in a fledgling state, it will very quickly grow to change our lives forever.

=FINAL PROJECT DOCUMENTATION=

For my final project, I wanted my audience to feel like a story was being told, but not much more than that. I also wanted to experiment with 'glitch art,' which I briefly mentioned at the beginning of class/top of the wiki page. I began by looking up tutorials and tips on how to create a glitchy/distortion effect in premiere, and also downloaded adobe audition.



Here is the site I downloaded 'glitch overlays' from. About half of these ended up in the final project. These were often combined with short clips quickly following each other back to back in premiere, with the location of these clips partly overlapping with identical clips (but in different positions). The combination of these, and the occasional gaussian blur effect, made for a realistic feeling that one was actually viewing a distorted/corrupted video file.



Above is an example of one of the glitch overlays being blended in with a title screen, as well as a duplication of that title screen with a changed position.



I also decided to tinker with adobe audition for this project. My use of it was fairly limited, since it was not covered in class, but my hope was to use sound to emphasize the 'glitchiness' of the piece by using distortion sound effects and altering the decibel output. This was the only part of my work where I used material from online, however the piano piece I used (Bach's Well Tempered Clavier) has sentimental value and I originally hoped I would be able record myself playing it (I was unable to do this due to not being able to find a good enough microphone). In the end I opted to use a public domain recording, however all other parts of the piece were my own photo/video (except for the glitch overlays).

Additionally, each specific floors were meant to vary in their 'glitchiness.' The middle third floor took the most time and utilized the most effects to be the most dissonant/distorted, while the beginning and end used fewer. I also contrasted nature pictures with more urban and intense pictures by each floor. This was partly inspired from Thomas Cole's series of paintings called "The Voyage of Life" paintings, which are meant to be viewed sequentially and depict the story of someone's life.

Triggers