Tim's+Page+spr2018

=**Tim Smith**=

About Me
I am a senior Computer Science major and Japanese minor. I have worked with programs like photoshop and a few programs aimed at game development and its corresponding 3D graphics. I really like doing 3D modeling in my free time, sometimes I do pixel art, and every once in a while I try to make funny photoshops for my friends. Im not great at drawing, but my Mom is an art teacher and my older brother went to art college so I have been surrounded by art at my home. I am most interested in game development and its art workflow. Over the last couple years I have tried getting into 3D modeling and pixel art, and have learned a lot about actual game programming. My dream job is to work at Nintendo of Japan as either a game programmer or artist.

**Week 1 Assignment**
To me, fair is in theory a very smart policy for the government to hold up. It protects artists from getting their works stolen without fair compensation. It encourages, maybe by fear of paying a fine, new artists to be creative and find their own style. There are probably millions of stealing cases where the original artist rightfully win compensation for their artwork. What is bad about fair use is the actual implementation, or how subjective the policy can be. For example, in the article there was a segment where a piece of film had about 3 seconds worth of "The Simpsons" in the background of their scene. This small aspect of the scene holds little to no value to the film maker or their end product, but they have two options because of fair use; delete the segment of film that contains the television series, or pay a small fine to the creator of the show. If it were something like 20 seconds of the show, or it was more heavily focused in the scene then maybe i would be in agreement with the rules, but it seems like such a small piece of the actual film makers final product. Another example recently in pop culture is how the band Radiohead is suing Lana Del Ray for "stealing" their song titled "Creep" and using parts of it in her new song. For about a minute and 20 seconds of her song "Get Free", Lana uses the same rhythm and chord progression as the popular Radiohead song. While i do agree that it sounds similar, I don't think that Radiohead should be able to sue Lana Del Ray over this. There are only so many chord progressions, the lyrics aren't anything like the Radiohead song, and it similarities end after a minute and 20 seconds in, but the band wanted 100% of the profits made from the song. In the end, this lawsuit did not go through, and Lana kept all of the profits from the song. This kind of case puts my judgement in a gray area. I do believe that the song sounded very similar, but it wasn't for the entire song, just one segment although it was long by music standards, and the lyrics were very different. This is what i don't like about the fair use policy, it is very vague in determining what is stolen and what is used rightfully, especially in things like art and music. The one part of the article that caught my attention was how Terry Gilliam had to pay for the appearance of a Warhol Xerox of a painting by Davinci. This seems crazy to me that someone else can claim ownership of something that they took by fair use, and use that piece to get money when other people use it in their art. I think the policy would work better if there was a certain level of separation. Something like, if you took something by fair use, you can only get paid for other artists showing it if you somehow changed the original piece significantly. I don't think making a xerox copy of someone else's art justifies this policy to be upheld.

Exercise 1
Text Covered and Put Side by Side

Replacing Image

White Space



Trace of Removed



Choice



Project 1

Progress Pictures:

Colorized





Scavenger Hunt
I used the last image as the layer mask



Cinemagraph



Video Projects

H.264 link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1tYpwxsbywP7cUATun0vcTouBKPa_2Go6

https://youtu.be/hLnbuWmjrYQ



Marriage, Night we Lost - Tony Smith : I plan on changing the way that the edges are perceived. Maybe have something pass through one wall but go in front of another one, just trying to make it seem like an optical illusion.



Lying with the Wolf - Kiki Smith : I plan on mixing up the species of either the human or the wolf, perhaps only the head of each.



Rubber Band - Tim Hawkinson : I want to play with the idea of gravity in this one, maybe try to have a car going around the track and never falling down or off.

Krauss Article Response:

The article starts off with a discussion about visual art mediums. Things like painting, videos, and others all have their own set of conditions. Specifically, Krauss writes about the center of a painting being physically different than the center of a video, because the video is always moving and the center is hard to detect. I think in that way, Krauss' thesis is trying to say that different mediums of art reflect the way that the art is both interpreted and received. Specifically talking about how video is different than paintings not because it is fluid and continuous, but because there is a perfect reflection of what is seen, and leaves little to be abstract or fiction. For example, Krauss talks about symmetry and mirroring a lot, but mirroring is a perfect reflection of what is seen by other people. That is the same exact thing with video, but not visual arts. In this way, Krauss seems to believe that video art, in nature, is very narcissistic. Saying that all video art is just trying to put something that we can all see very plainly and call it unique makes it seem narcissistic, but I believe that there exists some abstraction within its content. Krauss connects this into saying that this mirroring effect makes it difficult to compare other mediums with video. If this article were to be written in 2015, I think the majority of this argument would be nullified. With things like CGI and after effects, videos have joined in with the other visual arts with its new ability to be abstract and fictional. No longer is a video a perfect reflection of what is seen by the camera. We can create stories with programs and footage with a couple button clicks. No longer is video art a narcissistic art medium by nature. That is not to say that it cannot be narcissistic, but there are many possible ways to make the same levels of abstraction that you see in paintings happen within video art. I think if Krauss was still looking for a thesis in 2015, it would be more involved with how after effects can be too far separated from the footage itself, and not be cohesive. This may be different than art forms in video today, but in my experience, whenever I see a movie or a video online with after effects, it is always used as a joke or an action scene, and never to invoke thought in the viewer. I think if Krauss were to write about the popular video "art" of today, she would probably sound upset.

Concept strategy video & writeup

Final Video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mB3LB7vkMmZwf3iT70gHOlDiToPo49Ug

or @https://youtu.be/nVFjyI15O4g

For this video, i took inspiration from the artwork "Rubber Band" by Tim Hawkinson. The band is made up of solid, non bendable wood blocks but when combined made a curved feature. This got me thinking about how i could make a video out of building blocks, that when put together they made something the parts could not do. I first thought of making a stop motion kind of video, where i would record my walking cycle and put it together to make it look like a fluid animation, but realized that accurately recording that would be troublesome. I then thought about doing something with music. You had told me about some piece where it was just clips from Kanye West songs where he just says "I", and when put together it makes something different. I took a slightly different route but followed with the music idea. I took several clips of a guitarist playing simple chords on the guitar, and overlayed them to fit the song "Let it Be" by the Beatles accurately. I tried to get it to sound as natural as possible, while having the lyrics and piano in the background. I think that having 4 or 5 chords in 4 second clips and combining them to make a melody is something similar to Tim Hawkinson's Rubber Band. In this video, i used chords like C major, G major, F major, and A minor. I found that the song Let it Be, only used those 4 chords plus the occasional A minor 7th, but that is very similar to A minor so i just used them interchangeably. I originally wanted to make the song sound like Mary had a little Lamb, but that song was too uninteresting to me, so i chose the Beatles song. I hoped that combining these 4 chords in a specific order and length would make it sound like a song just by themselves, and it does. When i listened to the audio without the background piano and lyrics, you can still tell that it is "Let it Be" by the Beatles. When i was researching the pieces by Tim Hawkinson, I chose the Rubber Band because it made me think of old cartoons and their jokes with gravity, where some characters could walk upside on the ceiling. I originally thought to do something like this, but i couldnt think of a good way to achieve this or a way to make it conceptually interesting in a video. However, this piece definitely inspired me to work with what i considered building blocks, which in music, is clearly single notes or chords. I also tried to make the video itself seem some what like a rubber band, with the rotation and quick scaling like how I imagine a rubber band moves when flying through the air. I originally tried to use speed as well, but i had troubles keyframing the video along with the music and keeping it in sync, so I scrapped that idea.