ITP Classes (old posts, page 10)

Laura Owens at the Whitney

Laura Owens is a contemporary American painter. Sometimes criticized for being overly cheerful[2], her large and colorful paintings combining multiple techniques do seem whimsical at first but upon closer reflection communicate a deeper thoughtfulness and emotion.

One of Owen’s works that struck me as particularly intriguing is her untitled piece derived from old newspaper plates she found under the shingle siding of her home[1,3]. The piece looks like a collage that started with the front page of a Sunday newspaper, and was actually made with Adobe Photoshop along with oil paint and screen printing. Owens made several similar pieces and one of them was on display at the Whitney.

front page of newspaper with some pieces cut out and some random selections cut out and moved to new locations.

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Plan

Dream

My conceptual motivation for this project is to create visually compelling animations using large amounts of spatial data.

Data by itself is formless. Our present technology community collects vast amounts of data. Some of that data is a record of the physical space we humans live in. My dream is to access that data and reimagine it in a way that maintains the integrity of the data and inspires viewers to appreciate the beauty of the originating physical space.

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Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting

Carolee Schneemann is a provocative and influential artist whose work challenged the art establishment and our society’s perception of art. Her career has spanned many decades and her artwork took on many forms, and throughout all of it she fought against sexism and bias against female artists.

Schneemann was the first woman from her family to attend college, getting a scholarship to study art at Bard College. At school she would pose nude for paintings by other students, but when she painted self-portraits the paintings would be stolen by male students. Eventually, she was expelled from the school for “moral turpitude.” This was not fully explained to her but she attributed it to the paintings she had been making of herself.

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First Pop-up

In our first class we learned about basic paper engineering and pop-ups. Our assignment was to make a paper bug using a template. Here is the result:

folded paper card with a raised rectangular surface in the center, some paper arms sticking out the side of the raised surface, and two holes at the top for eyes.

I used scissors and an exacto knife to cut the paper. All of the paper is attached using one-sided artist tape except for the bug's arms, which are attached with two-sided tape. I found the bone folder to be very useful for making good folds.

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Hand Router

My first project is a skill builder exercise using a hand router to cut a particular shape out of a piece of wood. Ben said we could make any shape we wanted, but I elected to replicate the shape outlined in the exercise description.

Here is the end result:

Animation showing two images of a circular shape cut out of a piece of wood and the original piece of wood with a the same shaped hole cut out of the center.

I encountered some problems making this that I will describe below.

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History of Contemporary Art and New Media

History of Contemporary Art and New Media, taught by RoseLee Goldberg.

Class blog posts:

Project Development Studio

Project Development Studio, taught by Daniel Rozin.

Class blog posts:

Subtraction

Subtraction, taught by Ben Light.

Class blog posts:

Unity Maze Game

Here's a video of the Unity game I discussed in my previous post:

The music is Shizaru by Lie Too Fine.

This is a Windows game I can play with a game controller. I've also compiled this for an Android phone but can't try it because I don't have the proper USB-C cable. It seems Unity can also make a virtual reality version of this too. Can't wait to try this out on my new Google Pixel 2 phone.