Distortions

Distortions is a independent project that was worked on through the entirety of my senior year of college. It is a collaboration of art and technology.

The point of this project is to question how when an item is slightly altered can the big picture meaning change completely?

Having the images arranged in a random order allows the user to experience the program while seeing the same images displayed with different ones neighboring it each time. (the images only get the random order when the program starts up so to see different orders they have to run the program more than once) If a user interacts with the project on two different days, when the program has restarted, the order of images will be new, and thus creating a new story for them to try and comprehend. In order for the user to explore the story they will be marching in place on wooden blocks, this idea came from wanting them to be able to walk through the pages. The elevated blocks force the user to be intentional about wanting to change what they see as they need to interact with it, rather than looking on from the side

Now that there was a pile of cut up papers the next step was to scan them into the computer. It was important that the scans were done correctly as they needed to be aligned with each other, and had to be high enough quality so I could have 4k resolution so that it would not look pixelated on the 65 inch monitors. The process was to take a page, line it up, close the scanner, press go, wait for the scan to complete, turn the page over, and repeat, until both sides of all the pages were scanned. The resolution is quantified by Dots Per Inch, but more commonly referred to as DPI. I scanned the pages at 90 DPI. The high DPI allows the images to be displayed on a larger screen, as it would not get blurry or pixelated, as there is enough information.

Once all the files were in the computer, each image was individually brought into Adobe’s Photoshop. Here the three tools were mainly used to digitally cut out the holes in the paper. The first tool used was the magnetic lasso tool. This tool allowed users to circle the holes and it would be precise on what was the page and what wasn't as it differentiated between colors. When a hole was on one side of the page the marquee tool was used. This tool creates a shape and was able to create a box and just delete the contents that were inside.

GETTING HOLES

When planning what pages that were going to be used, it was important for there to be an aspect of the project that was in no one's control. This led to coming up with the idea that all the pages that were used had to be cut up to create a different piece of art. This was easy at first as there were a bunch of magazines in the back of the visual arts room, however not that many of the magazines had pages that were cut up. The solution was to get more pages to be cut up for creating art and to host a collage night. This was a huge success, 8 people showed up and made their own collages. When people arrived I tried to not give them too much information, what I said was along the lines of “make a collage. Create whatever you want, but just make sure you cut out the page from the magazine and when you are done with the page put it in the pile.” they were advised to look through all the magazines, and that nothing was off limits. I explained that the pages should be cut/ ripped however they want, but to try and keep the page recognizable (don’t just rip it up for fun, and cut close to what they wanted). I wanted to intervene as little as possible with the volunteers so I did not influence what they created, this meant that the only limitation that they were given was the magazine publisher, Life Magazine. If they asked why they were doing this I told them that I would need to scan the magazine pages after, but did not tell them much more than that. Some people did know more as they are my friends, so they have heard me talk about it, but I think having a group of people all collaging together may have distracted them from my end goal. When the night was complete everything that had been created was scanned, and there was a huge stack of papers that had all been cut up

Check out my flip book at a better look at sone of the cool generated images.

distortions (1).pdf

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