Assignment A5 - Xerox

For the Xerox project I decided to simply try and recreate an eye because of all the parts on the human body I find eyes the most interesting and captivating. I choose to do an eye because I was inspired by the surrealist art movement and I found it ironic, in a sense, to illustrate a part of the body recreated out of other body parts. As humans we use our eyes every day to see ourselves and the world around us, but we never have the chance to view our own eyes unless we look into a mirror or we are photographed. I wanted to get across the idea that people shouldn’t take anything for granted. Sight is an amazing sense that most humans are fortunate to have. Most probably don’t ever even think about the sense of sight because it’s something that has been there for them since the beginning. Hopefully my piece will influence viewers to be more conscious about themselves and the world around them and how they shouldn’t take things for granted.

P.S. I had some trouble with the printers in Cass and some of my prints came out with a red tint to them even though I printed them in black and white.

Assignment A4 - Grid Art

For the grid art project I decided to create something inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s Love Is Calling exhibit that we had the pleasure of viewing in the Tampa Museum of Art. At first I had no idea what I was going to create for this project, but after going into the exhibit twice and fully getting the chance to immerse completely in the art I came up with a simple but meaningful idea. I choose to simply create a yin yang symbol using colorful pellets that could be ironed together. In the poem that Kusama reads in her exhibit titled, Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears, Kusama talks about life and death, love and loneliness, and I believe the yin yang symbol simply but distinctly get across Kusama’s overall theme. A yin yang symbol symbolizes two contrasting things or ideas but how the two things always seem to meet or mash together in some sense. While in the exhibit I noticed that if I stood in one place and looked all around but down I would always see an infinite number of all the
people in the room including myself but as soon as I looked down it looked as though I was looking into an infinite abyss where I saw no one and not really even myself. For me this experience in her exhibit makes me consider the idea of what is life without death. If there was no such thing as death, life itself would have no true meaning because everyone would live forever. I feel as though society forces the idea that life is supposed to be this glorious thing that everyone should love and be grateful for but death is also a part of life and death is sad and unfortunate but you can’t really have one without the other. 

XTRA X2 - ASCII Art

After taking some time to view the ASCII website I was amazed at the various artwork pieces presented on the website. I was shocked when I found out that the website has been up since 1995. Now in 2018, twenty-three years later and the website is still being updated regularly with more creative works from various artist. Before viewing this website I honestly had no idea what ASCII stood for or what it even was. I now know that ASCII stand for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange” and that ASCII is basically a computer code in which people are use certain characters and symbols in order to create various artworks. I liked how at the bottom of the web page there are different tutorials that people can follow in order to create ASCII art. There is even a questioner that has questions that people can read and follow in order to learn more about ASCII. After learning a little about ASCII art I actually like it because it’s something that is different and I feel like it’s something that most people do not know how to easily create.

One thing I was surprised about was the section on the website that talked about fonts. I didn’t know how important font, its size, and its spacing was for coding and for creating the images. Each letter in the font has to be proportionally spaced out the same so that the pictures can be created and viewed easily. I have seen ASCII art before on social media or in emails but I have never paid attention to the font style used. It never crossed my mind that something like font style would be important for something like this.

As I looked through the images on the site some looked pretty simplistic while others looked more complex. I liked the images that were created using letters and symbols more than the ones that just used the lines. I’m currently taking a digital media class and for our first project we had to create a picture using code from the HTML5 Canvas program. For me personally the project was very challenging. Trying to create a picture from simple shapes and figuring out how to position the coordinates so the shape is in the right place was very hard and confusing. Now after learning a little about coding I have a new found respect for people who do it because it seems very challenging and time consuming, so patience is a must.

I was also shocked at how many categories this website had when it came to the pictures. The categories even had categories within them. I randomly selected and ended up clicking on the “Television” category. I was expecting to see current popular TV characters but I actually ended reliving my childhood in a weird way. Within the “Television” category there were tabs that had the names of various TV shows that I used to watch as a child. Looking through the pictures was kind of sad but also nostalgic in a way. It seems like it was such a long time ago that I watched those TV shows but I remember the good childhood memories associated with them.

Assignment A3 - Technology Paper

When you hear the word “technology” shoes is not the first word that comes to mind. Shoes have been around for a long time and have drastically evolved through the decades. In the beginning they were simply made to protect feet from the natural elements. As time went on they became a symbol of social class and power. Now, shoes are used for fashion and performance. One shoe in particular, the sneaker, has come a long way. The first sneakers, or originally called “plimsolls,” were created in the late 18^th century (The History). They were simply regular shoes but they had rubber soles. The rubber soles are how these shoes got their more popular name “sneaker” (The History). It’s said that “the rubber soles made the shoes noiseless while walking and someone could actually sneak up on someone without them hearing” (The History). In today’s society not only are sneakers popular but shoes of all kinds are popular and worn by many. One man who is a known legend in the footwear scene is Tinker Hatfield. Tinker Hatfield is an American designer who is most famous for his designs of Nike’s Air Jordan series. Hatfield and Michael Jordan worked together for years coming up with the designs for the popular Nike Air Jordan’s series. At one point is his career with Nike, Hatfield was asked to design a sneaker for the 1985 film Back To The Future. In a documentary series on Netflix named Abstract, Hatfield explains how for the film they “needed a special shoe that would fit into the year 2015, which was 25 years into the future at the time” (Tinker) After months of planning and designing Hatfield and his team came up with the design for the self-lacing sneaker. In the film Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly wears a pair of Nike self-lacing sneakers but the ones worn in the film were actually a dummy shoe prototype that didn’t actually work. This design left Hatfield wanting to design and create an actual self-lacing shoe and year later E.A.R.L. (Electric Adaptable Reaction Lacing) was created (Tinker). In the early stages of E.A.R.L. there were many problems Hatfield and his team ran into. The first prototypes of the sneakers had to either be “plugged into a wall or the person wearing them had to carry around an old car battery in a backpack” or something which is very impractical for everyday use (Tinker). Advancements in batteries and other technology had to be made for Hatfield and his team to create the first ever self-lacing sneaker that would actually work and be functional. It took the team at Nike a year and a half of trial and error to finally create the “Nike Hyperadapt 1.0” In the documentary Hatfield explains how he wanted to “make a shoe that would be smart and could sense who you were. And when you put the shoe on it comes alive and shapes to your foot” (Tinker). The Nike Hyperadapt was exactly this, as a former track and field athlete Hatfield talks about how feet “undergo an incredible amount of stress during competition,” but every athlete wants to be the best and Hatfield believed with a good pair of performance sneakers this was achievable (Tinker). Overall, Hatfield wanted to make a shoe that was not only fashionable but comfortable and functional as well. Most people use their feet every day and wearing the right pair of shoes for the right occasion can make a big difference. It’s very important for people to wear not only a good pair of shoes but the right pair of shoes. Maintaining good foot health is necessary because your feet help with various body movements and can reduce or omit some bodily pains and aches. In the future I don’t know where shoes will go. Maybe Hatfield and his team will create a pair of magnetic levitating sneakers like they wanted in the Back To The Future film originally. Maybe shoes will stay the same but I’m sure of one thing and that is that I doubt shoes will ever go out of style.

Works Cited

Picone, Kiri. “The Fascinating History of Footwear.” ati (All That’s  Interesting, 23 April 2013, https://allthatsinteresting.com/fascinating-history-footwear. Accessed 6 October 2018.

“Tinker Hatfield: Footwear Design.” Abstract: The Art of Design, season 1, episode 2, 10 Feb. 2017. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80093805. Accessed 6 October, 2018.

“The History and Evolution of Shoes.” DOLITA, 5 Mar. 2018, www.dolitashoes.com/blogs/news/the-history-and-evolution-of-shoes. Accessed 6 October, 2018.