Blog Entry 6: Final Project Brainstorming

Possible Themes:

Self/self reflection-

This topic interests me because I have changed a lot as a person since the beginning of college. I think this topic will be relate able for my audience. All of us are thinking about ourselves, our self-image, and how others perceive us. In the modern day, with social media, I often feel that sometimes people intentionally post things online to project a false image of themselves to make themselves look better than reality.

A cliche image for this topic would be a mirror, but I want to tackle this cliche head on and make my project meaningful. So far I’m planning on making a collage of mirrored images of someone (either myself or a different person) and build upon the image from there.

I’m hoping that I can get people to be interested in this topic by using visual illusions in my collage to attract the audience. Also, there has been so much controversy about using photoshop to alter images of models all over the media and how it projects an unreal standard of beauty. I want to use the irony that I’m using Photoshop to create an image about self, and how one perceives themselves, and how others perceive you.


Community-

This topic interests me because I think there is a strong sense of community on our campus. Even though we have 60,000 people attending OSU, I feel like we can always come together as one, unified community and rally together for something whether it’s sports, Pelotonia, or raising money for BuckeyeThon.

To represent the Buckeye community, some cliche images would be: the buckeye nut, the buckeye tree, the Block O, and anything else to do with the OSU logo. Cliche images of community in general would be people holding hands, hearts, people sitting together at a table. I might use this topic for my iMovie project, but I’m still in the process of  brainstorming.

I think people should care about this topic because the idea of community impacts our daily lives. For example, after the recent school shooting in Florida, all the high school students and families are working together to fight for better gun control. They are gaining support worldwide, and thus expanding their community of support. There is also going to be a national walk out day, so this means numerous communities will be working together as a whole to advocate for gun control. I think communities have more power than we realize, and through communities, people have the chance to impact others and the world around us.


Change/Future-

This topic interests me because I think robotics is an ever changing field that can be applied in so many different ways. Prosthetic limbs have changed people’s lives and allowed them to pursue what ever they want to. Robots are being used in manufacturing factories. We can use robots in our homes in our daily lives. In the future, I’m sure robots will be able to do so much more. I want to learn about what is being improved about these robots that we already have and what future designs look like. This is just an initial idea because I’m not entirely sure where to go beyond this.

Cliche images would be robots from movies, like the Iron Giant, Short Circuit, or Big Hero 6. My favorite is Baymax from Big Hero 6 because if he existed in the real world, he could be saving so many lives and helping patients recover.

People should care about this topic because technology is going to change faster than we realize. Amazon has created a store with no cashiers or lines, and several companies are already working on self driving cars. I hoping to portray the future of technology through my work so the audience can get a glimpse of what the future may look like.

Group Joiner Project

The most exciting part of this project was creating the physical collage. It was so much easier to physically pick up the photos and arrange them how I wanted to. Being able to work with paper and scissors made it easier for me and my group to collaborate together. We could move around the images, but we had to be careful cutting up the images because there is no undo button to reverse to the original picture. I liked our Photoshop collage too, but I found it harder to work together because one person is controlling the mouse while the rest of us look at the monitor. Overall, I think the physical collage was more successful because we were able to put all of our creative input together and show movement through our piece.

The most frustrating part of this project was the photo merge image. All of our images ended up looking like a stack of photos on top of each other. I tried to select different images and a different amount of images and the results all nearly looked the same. I think Photoshop saw the repeated background of the Wex center and just piled all the pictures on top of each other to align the lines of the structure together. Photoshop wasn’t able to make the same decisions as my team and I wanted to. We did not want a pile of images, but to arrange them in an interesting manner, which Photoshop’s algorithm failed at.

Although I think art created by algorithm and AI should still considered to be art, they can’t completely replace art created by humans. No matter how complex Photoshop algorithms are, it is nearly impossible to replicate the creativity of the human mind, which is what makes us separate from other species. I agree with Hockney that physical images can create a powerful piece of art, but tools like Photoshop can further enhance an artist’s creativity. I think Photoshop is a powerful tool to edit and manipulate images, and is much quicker to modify than creating a physical piece of art. I also think digital media through Photoshop is equally as important as art we see in museums because majority of our lives have become digital now. We can use the internet as another creative outlet, so we could definitely use Photoshop as another tool to create art.

Composite Landscape

What if someone lost their umbrella while visiting the unusual Golden Gate Bridge?

Riya’s Composite Landscape

Screenshot of Enterprise tutorial