Two weeks remaining in the class and I finally was able to make progress on writing my own style transfer code. I didn't write it from scratch, I rewrote the existing code I found online to improve the code quality and make it fit my workflow. I'm going to continue working to make further improvements over the next few days.
Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) is an American conceptual artist and photographer who addresses themes of identity, history, and popular culture as they relate to African Americans. His work shows the stereotypes used to portray African Americans as well as the uniqueness and humanity of the individual beneath the stereotype.
Bernd Becher (b. 1931) and Hilla Becher (b. 1934) were German conceptual artists and photographers who worked as a team to photograph buildings and industrial structures. As internationally recognized artists the couple met Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre and engaged each other in an artistic dialogue, supporting each other’s creativity.
Cyprien Gaillard (b. 1980) is a prominent young French artist who makes films, sculptures, and paintings. His work focuses on the artistic expression of concepts of entropy, destruction and humankind’s impact on nature.
Our next assignment for Collaborative Design is to write code for a crude prototype. It doesn't have to look pretty; we just need to vet our ideas and build something to see if things work as we expect.
This week's assignment is the Four-Axis Mill skill builder. Our goal was to get some experience using the machine.
I milled this simple object out of a dowel rod that was left over from a previous assignment.
Not everything went as expected. I did learn a lot about the limits of the machine though, and that makes me happy.
My next project is to build a wooden mallet with the lathe. It was quite a challenge! I look at this mallet and am amazed I was able to make this. The wood lathe is an intimidating machine.
Today I am meeting with ITP's Feedback Collective to discuss this project. I'm going to use this blog post to present what my project is about so this post will provide a review of what I've accomplished.
The basic idea is to take Google Street View photos and stylize them to make them more visually appealing. Although the Google Street View tool is an amazing application the photos taken can be fairly dull looking. Google is working to address this but they are aiming for a high degree of realism. My goal is to take a much more artistic approach.
Our second assignment for Collaborative Design is to complete a "Readout" for our project. We now have a name for our project and a brief elevator pitch. We also did a few user interviews and thought about the technology we might use to build a proof of concept.
Sherrie Levine emerged as an important artist in the early 80's. She is famous for her Appropriation Art where she would take photographs of widely distributed photos made by famous male artists and present the work as her own, examining the concept of originality.
I created a short 10 minute presentation on Sherrie Levine to share with the class.