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.