Shelby+Fredrickson

Shelby L. Fredrickson  **Major:** BS in Public Health, BA in Fine Art

**Experience with computers/software:** Remarkably little. A (tiny) bit of experience with Photoshop.

**Art experience:** As an art major, a lot of my time has been spent in various little studios on campus. My concentration is in sculpture but I've experimented in oil painting, watercolors & ceramics. I dabble in tattoo design and am never very far from my sketchbook.

**Me:** I'm a coffee addict from Maryland who loves NPR, sunflowers, and hiking.

As an "artist" (?) who has mostly studied only classical mediums, I hope to learn a lot more about the contemporary, digital art world and videography this semester.

  "I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance." - Vincent van Gogh
 * Artistic Interests: **

**Manovich Examples:**

1. Numerical Representation: 

2. Modularity 

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">3. Automation

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">4. Variability <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">5. Transcoding

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 * <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Photoshop Exercise: **

//Part 1// 303 x 425

//Part 2//





//Part 3//






 * <span style="color: #050e05; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Presence/Absence Project: **

//Part 1: Absence//











<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 140%;">Explanation: For this part of the presence/absence project, I focused on removing myself from pictures in which I felt that my own presence didn't really matter, or even exist. I chose five different types of "presence"; 1. to exist in a memory, like in the polaroid films 2. to exist in the presence of something that can be more powerful than your own that captivates your attention, like standing in front of an art exhibition 3. to exist in the presence of what I consider to be the ultimate presence; that of the beauty of nature that constantly surrounds us without demanding our attention 4. to exist in autonomy where your presence or the absence of your presence really doesn't matter, like in a crowd 5. to exist in a mere reflection, in which you don't really exist at all.

//Part 2: Masking//

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<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 150%;">Les Manovich Response:

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">This article was really quite eye-opening for me in terms of learning about a whole new realm of the art world that I've never particularly been interested in or knew much about. I think that most students are so accustomed to using technology in every aspect of our lives that we don't view it as a means of producing art; other than animation. It's fascinating to think about how far the world of digital media has come since the technology capable of producing graphics and typography became relevant- and how much smaller.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">I was immediately interested in this article because of the era in which Manovich discussed as the most significant time period in this revolution of digital media, because I myself am a product of this era; a time in which technology and media were changing very, very quickly, and on convergent paths. It's kind of fascinating to think that the students of today, people of my generation, have lived through a period of growth from the analog world of VHS tapes and Disney movies that used the simplest forms of software to create multi-layered animation series to the era we live in now- one of complex, hybrid & live action computer imagery. I think that Manovich's comparison of the revolution exemplified by the changes made in motion imagery to a non-violent political revolution was a little extreme but I do think the analogy illustrates the focal point of how primitive software like After Effects changed & subsequently dominated the world of digital imagery.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">The other section of this article that I was drawn to concerned Media Remixability. As a student who typically thinks of art mediums as charcoal or oils, it took me a little while to fully wrap my head around the idea of an entirely new "metamedium". As I understand it, media remixability is almost like taking this revolution in motion graphics and taking it one step further with the compilation of multiple techniques that were previously confined to individual subsets of media. It seems that the concept of media remixability is what produces such lifelike digital representation or animation; by combing these different techniques, a much more complex, although not necessarily visually complex, form of media is produced.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">ULTIMATELY: Whether we notice it or not, digital media surrounds us in every part of everyday life. The velvet revolution is not just a gradual transformation in the ways we produce this media, but also refers to a cultural phenomenon in which major advances in technology have created groundbreaking software systems that are changing the way we see the world.

<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">1. Why do you think that the modern media culture transformed so quickly, beginning in the 1990s? <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">2. Do you think it's applicable or even necessary to compare the "Velvet Revolution" of moving image culture to an actual political revolution? (liberation of Soviet Satellites) <span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">3. How is the Velvet Revolution applicable to you own life as a student born in the middle of this era?