Changing the Stars

If the stars can change in seasons and latitudes, then can they change in the observer? Do heavenly bodies appear as seeds and buckets of water to the sinewy farmer standing on his famine-stricken earth or as silvery coins to the bemoaning beggar. This also brings the question: can anybody perceptually alter these entities? Can people besides the poor and desperate make these transformations? If a sun-blistered farmer and a simple vagrant can do it, why couldn't a king?  Can things like stars that are so untouchable, consistent and seemingly eternal be completely mutable? I asked the one question because I don't know how to think like a king and I asked the other because I don't know how so many people are completely unable to manage or change their own lives for a better result but can effortlessly swing around the long-dying gas-giants and spin top-turning quasars of blue and green into the places they want them to be. 

The stars are personal but universal, like finger prints. Permanent, but alterable, like the human soul. When the ancients looked at the stars they saw gods and dragons and heroes, today we still see some of the same myths and stories that the ancients ascribed to the stars, but we give them names like  Dec 7° 24.426' instead of names like Betelgeuse. You can use the declination coordinates to find that star somewhat easily or you can just look for the hand of Orion, either way you'll be led to the same red giant. But you don't have to see the hand of a Zeus-ordained hunter or an alpha-numeric code, it can be whatever you see upon first sight.

The Cellar

In the cellar, the scales weigh corruptly,

The lives cease directly.

In the cellar, life can end abruptly,

for it's pardoned incorrectly.

The cellar sits beneath Winster cottage.

Its temporary flowers, like all deceptions, 

Trick the eye away from the carnage 

And casts anew false perceptions.

The old Winster home is always present,

Sitting on the green, grassy hill.

If the plaster walls were transparent,

The sights would be most shrill.

The house stands alone on the crest,

Consuming some and threatening the rest. 

Final Project-- Astro Slide Show

Astro Slide Show by Cameron Bradford

 I was Inspired to do this picture from a song called “The Stars are Projectors” by the American band Modest Mouse. I used pictures of myself as a child mainly and I covered over them with a blanket of stars. The idea that the song expresses is that the stars are what project our lives on to this planet. The thought of such a thing amuses me because it’s just another way to ascribe an imaginative meaning to the marvelously versatile celestial grid. If the stars really are projectors, I just hope I have another reel waiting for me.

Made By A Man exhibit, Typed By Man-child

The 'Made by a Man' exhibit offers an interesting display of not only unusual artwork, but an exhausted attempt to show how society's arbitrary gender association is wrong. I found the art displayed to be very intricate, creative and impressive no matter who did it. I think the whole business about the artist being a man is insignificant. I feel like the only reason he did give the exhibit such a theme is to either justify himself or try to add a societal meaning to his work, but I think he should just let his work speak for itself and not try to attach a clumsy, hackneyed political message.
The piece I was most amused by was the purple number that was holding up a board. I thing the piece represents collective strength and the importance of solidarity or working together. This analysis may sound like a Saturday morning juice box commercial, but the concept of teamwork is actually always relevant. I am always a little embittered by the concept of teamwork because I am self-centered and like personal victories, I also played some sports in high school and never had a touch for athleticism which made me a rather disposable part of the team (I also hated my coach.) While the importance of teamwork may already be lost on me, it's not too late for these purple, re purposed ribbons. The work features several dips of the improvised fabric looping down and holding up a polished two by four. I think the fact that all these individual ribbons are working together to hold up something heavy represents teamwork.

Do you need someone around the house to find obvious symbolism in things? Call me, Cameron. I'll find any blatant symbolism or your money back.

Final Project WIP (The Stars Are Projectors)

My project is Based on a song called 'The Stars Are Projectors.' It's about stars literally being the things that project our life onto earth. The thing I'm posting isn't actually all the work I've got done. It's just the base of my picture. For some reason My other one wouldn't save for web.

I plan of putting a bunch of pictures of myself behind this so that all one can see is the image through the stars.

Proposal for the Final Assignment

In the final project, I want to make something not of this earth, but has the sentimentality that would be found here. Basically, I want to do something on space exploration or entertainment, I have an idea now that I'm particularly fond of. I was inspired by a Modest Mouse song called "The Stars are Projectors" I want to show a correlation between star gazing and entertainment.

Communication

In this picture I wanted to show two people right next to each other but completely oblivious. It's mainly a critique on the overuse of cell phones.For a while now, I have been kind of interested in creating something that shows how people can be living in the world but not actually living in the moment. People seem to always be interested in something that is happening somewhere else rather than what is around them. I think cell phones are a miraculous technology and they are make life much more convenient, but I don't think that they can replace actual human contact.
To make this I used very simple procedures in Photoshop. I simply took two photos in dark rooms and pasted them together over a black background. I hope it delivers the message I was wanting it to. I still have thoughts about using either only one picture or if I had the time, a lot of pictures like this creating a collage.If I ever use this idea again I may experiment with different subjects.

Living with Technology proposal

In this project I want to focus on people's face when they're looking at their phones. I mainly want to do this because I get annoyed when I'm talking to someone and they can't put their phone down (and I especially hate it when I catch myself doing it). This photo is really just a sample, the quality is obviously poor. On my actually project I plan on either having a slideshow of pictures similar to this one, each with a different person, or several people in a social situation, but all buried in their smart phones. The main thing that interests me about this is that people are fully able to submerse themselves into their own world were ever they go. That's why I am emphasizing the darkness around the light cast by the phone, it makes it seem as if nothing else matters.

Proposal for Assignment V

Like I said in my other recent blog post, I enjoyed 'Digital Nation's' exploration of the positive and negative qualities of technology. I love the idea of creating an ironic piece that shows someone being liberated and entrapped by technology. Like people who can fly but are always in cages, or people who know everything but can't remember any of it.

I haven't figure out exactly whether my project is going to be a gif, JPEG or video, but it shouldn't be hard to figure that out once I know exactly what I want to do.

Analysis of 'Digital Nation'

One aspect of Digital Nation that I particularly enjoyed is its exploration into the dual nature of technology. It showed that technology is severely effecting education, for kids from grade school to college. Some people are trying to incorporate technology into education and some are trying to go back to a simpler system. I liked how the documentary shows that technology has freed us and entrapped us. We have been able to more easily experience the world and interact with people ever since the start of the digital revolution. Everyone can know everything with in a matter of seconds, but it's not real knowledge. People don't bother to memorize things, and without memorization and actual knowledge that people store in their actual brains, they can't make connections. Making an assertive and specific correlation to two different thing is important in creative and logical thought. But that's becoming too much to ask of people because everything they know is only in their mind for a few minutes after they complete a Google search on it.

I think art is becoming more available to the masses, take myself as an example: before I started taking a class on digital manipulation, I never would have considered myself any sort of visual artist (I still don't), But now I can see that it's not so crazy for me to say I have some artistic skill. Of course, when something becomes accessible to more people there are positive and negative consequences. Now there are more artists who can spread their work around and gain a larger audience, but there's also more people who are witlessly filling the world with tasteless dreck. Like me.

Rocket Man

Rocket Man

 In this gif, I wanted to create something that gave a nod to space exploration. I used several images, both real and Photoshopped, as the background. I found the picture of the retro spaceman in a blog of vintage space exploration pictures. I wanted to show a contrast of technology, I featured a horse traveling through space extremely fast as a sort of absurd spacecraft. I also wanted to touch on the relationship of man and machine and how that has evolved from man and animal.

A Rock's Journey (Assignment IV)

This is just one of my art-boards, I couldn't figure out how to post a PDF to the blog. This basically sums up my other ones though. My goal for each board was to show earth's position relative to the sun, I considered doing some text or adding something else to to the frames, but I though it would be cooler with less. I want it to make people think for a second before they realize what it is. I also wanted to express something vast and complicated in a very remedial, deceptively simple manner.

Televised New York (Assignment III)

In this picture, I took many of the shows that take place in New York and set them away from the city as to map it out. My stipulations on which shows made it were that they had to be made after 1980 and had a run of five years or longer.
Eventually if I ever come back to this project I would like to make in more conclusive by having more shows and from all decades.

Old News Critique-- Ernie and his Amphicar

The picture that stood out most to me at the old news show was Ernie and his Amphibicar. The picture has a certain quality to it. It shows a man who has a then groundbreaking piece of technology that is rather useless in everyday life, but he was simply having a good time using it. Although the picture was just originally intended to be a news piece, it has transcended that into being an presentation of a simpler time, when people were amused by a vehicle that could go on land and water. Seeing all the pictures in this exhibit made me think of how I'll see the pictures from today's news in twenty-five of thirty years. I think the whole exhibit is important for people to see. It shows that we are all living in what will someday be history. I especially got something from the exhibit because I often wish I was able to live in the past, but the exhibit made me realize that some day I'll be able to look back over my whole life and see how all the things have changed.

Assignment 3 work in progress

I decided to just include television hows from new york for my project. The main problem I had with doing a larger scale map was that the map size was hard to balance with the sizes of the logos. With this map I can have more specific criteria for what goes into the piece.

Assignment III proposal

For assignment three I plan on doing a map of the US and somehow showing the geographic location of different TV shows. I haven't decided how I'm going to do it yet. I think what I may do is use the title of the shows and some how write them on to the show's location. I'm not sure what the criterion for the shows are going to be. I would like to use all shows, but that's a strenuous task for the time I have, so I may do something like every show from a certain era.

Visual Complexity

This visualization graph is made by deconstructing pop songs. Each graph is one song and the graph is composed of significant lines. Each line shows two thinks: the direction of the line is the pitch of the designated note and the the length of the line is the volume of the note. The graph itself is kind of  critique on popular music. It's about how many of the most popular songs were crafted by adults to statistically appeal to teenagers. It shows the music industry as a factory and not a creative source.

Market Place (Assignment II)

I constructed this picture by assembling several photos from the web in Photo Shop. I used several after affects to give the image more visual starkness. The image isn't supposed to be condemning of corporations but of the people who are blinded by them. To me the image is a critique on how impersonally modern people provide for themselves.

In this picture I was trying to capture the what it means to gather goods and disconnect between developed and developing nations. I'm not necessarily trying to criticize the means people use or say what is right and wrong, I mainly just wanted to juxtapose these two things in an extreme, ironic way.  I did the darkening of the sky as a sort of last minute thing. The meaning of it is open to interpretation. I suppose it could represent the duality of mankind. I tried to transcend the topic of class warfare as much as possible, I hope this isn't interpreted in that way. I really just wanted to make it about the extreme difference of cultures and how neither is right or wrong but both still exist.

Market Place

Proposal

I plan on doing  social satire on the vague interchangeability of modern politics. I want to emphasize the seeming blindness of the masses on certain issues and keep in mind my ignorance in a self defacing sort of way, but not so much as to let my self rum off on the work too much. I still have to figure out what my actual work will be and how I am going to approach it.

Materializing New Spaces Exhibit Critique. (picture #9)

This picture is made from a sketch and it is on canvas. It is done in black and white in a charcoal type fashion, the texture seems surprisingly smooth considering the medium. The piece is a conglomerated bird house that is floating through the air, the main structure has walkways running randomly around it and the bottom has ropes hanging down as to suggest similarities to a hot air balloon. There are also twigs and leaves growing from behind the main subject and slightly from the sides. The piece seems reminiscent of a simpler but still unreal time. It seems like something that could be found in an old German folk story or a Black Forrest fairy tale, it is very surreal and whimsical.

I feel like the piece is a charming understatement of a serious issue, overpopulation. The bird houses are very inviting and docile, but they are all being crowded together in what looks like a flower pot. I think the pot itself represents the earth and of course the houses are the incumbents. The twigs and lone leaf seem to bring to mind desperation and exhaustion of resources, overpopulation is causing starvation and exhaustion in the real world as well. I think the fact that it's still whimsical beautiful while representing such a harsh idea demonstrates man's ignorance to such problems.

I think this piece does a great job of hiding meaning in beauty and fleshing it out at the same time with some of the finer details of the work. Even the roads that are drawn sporadically around the houses seem to show a sort of lost confusion, none of the road actually go to the houses or anywhere the viewer could perceive as useful. Over all, the bird's lost and crowded world is more charming than ours.

O Holy Muse!

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I was kind of going for a surreal feel of how music can lighten an environment and seemingly comes from nowhere. I also wanted to make it seem like music is part of nature and that listening to music is part of the way things are supposed to be. I basically just pasted some images together and added black and white and vibrancy to the colored portion.

Is the color scheme too bombastic and contrasting? does the switch from black and white to colored seem contrived?

Financial Climate

The Pain

The Pain