Sound Visualization Documentation
My concept was when I got my acceptance letter to this school. I wanted to convey a feeling a anxiousness, nervousness, and excitement. I tried using a variety of interesting sounds to try to convey this because my earlier piece was too much like just recreating the sounds I heard. I used the ringing to try to convey excitement and a mixture of sounds to convey nervousness.
I used a variety of sounds like peeling off a layer of a lint roller, squeezing a plastic bottle, and footsteps. I tried to make the sounds more interesting, but it made it too difficult to understand where the event was taking place and what was going on in it. I used effects to try and make the sounds more interesting, but for some sounds I couldn’t find an effect that made them better and some sounds I wanted to use were too confusing, so I had to cut some out of my final project.
I would try to make it more clear what was happening in the environment and make my ending more clear. I would also make the ringing have a clearer purpose and have it actually lead up to things. I would also try to blend more sounds together and not have it lead from one sound to another.
The Uncertainty of Documentarism
In the modern age the validity and truthfulness of documentaries are always in question, but there has always been an air of uncertainty to their truth. The lack of absolute details makes it feel like people are their where the image was take and can use their brain to make up the details left out by the unclearness of the image. What is not said, or not present in an image is just as important if not more important than what is said or shown. A live broadcast used to prove one thing or another, but in the modern day we can use it as a template to show what should be seen there, or what could be seen.
Ethan Merrill, Photo Diptych
My concept is the opioid problem in America and I used the objects to try and show how opioids are easily accessible. I used money to show how it is a problem that is founded on human greed. I used the flowers because I wanted to show how opioids slowly poison people over time and often times the effects take a while to show themself (the petals slowing turning from red to blue).
I started by choosing objects to represent things I wanted (pills, money, duck=populous) Then I did different compositions that showed different emotions and different parts of the problem. I went with the picture I chose because I felt it looked the best and best conveyed the emotions of the topic looming over people, but still hidden in the background. The next thing I did was try relate colors to the objects in the pictures and then relate objects to different parts of the problem such as the coffee representing peer pressure. I adjusted the hue of individual images and created clipping masks. I also blended some pictures together using the eraser tool.
If I had more time I would have liked to find better objects to represent the problems such as American money, or something that better represented the peop
le. I might have also used more objects to make the composition more interesting.
Soundscape Memory
The memory I chose is when I read my acceptance letter to NYU Shanghai. I was in the library at lunch time so it was pretty busy and there was the quiet whispers of conversation in the background. I remember my friends talking about a math test they had in the next period, and how they stayed up late studying for it. I distinctly recall clicking on the email saying there had been an update in my application, the click somehow managed to be loudest thing in the room. When I read the words “you have been accepted” I stopped hearing all the conversations going on around me because the beating of heart was unbearably loud. I immediately walked down the hall to tell one of my teachers, my sneakers squeaking all the way, with my footsteps being audible and my heart continued to race. I remember the squeak of the door hinges as I entered my teachers office and distinct quietness that followed after leaving the hallway.
Diptych Concept Assignment
I want to convey fantasy in real life and make an everyday object interesting (like a coffee pot that can fly or something like). I want to practice surrealism. I was thinking of doing something where one of the pictures seems completely normal, but then with the other picture it becomes something else (like a picture of someone smiling and then next to it the same picture but now the person has something covering their face, or maybe its just the outline of the person, maybe the person is blurred to be out of focus and now you can clearly see something else behind the person.). I plant to go to the Bund and take pictures there (maybe I can get a picture of a boat like I depicted in my first Sound Visualization project). I also plan to just take pictures of random things and just see what happens (I do not have a plan at the moment, but I will get one) I plan to manipulate the second image quite a bit and make it so it is recognizable as the same image, but also different enough that it takes a second to realize.
Sound Visualization Process
Ethan Chavez Merrill, Slow Dancing in the Dark, Joji
Concept and Design
When I first made my sound visualization project I depicted a real image which is not allowed. I then started over completely and used a different song. I wanted to convey the slow rhythm of the song and show the motion of falling. I used the gestalt theories of figure and ground, proximity, and closure in order to convey this. Then during the critique I took the recommendations into consideration and changed my project again this time adding a little bit of symmetry as well. I removed the M and vs because they were taking away from the continuity of the image, and I added more Os to represent the bass in the song.
Process
I worked in phases designing a draft on paper and then making it in illustrator and changing it slightly as I did so, then I would get feedback from my peers and make changes based on that. I made 3-4 drafts that I thought were good and were my “final” drafts, but I ended up changing them after critiques.
Conclusion
If I had more time I would have liked to add more gestalt principles and maybe change the size of a few things, but overall I am pretty happy with my final project.
In Our Own Image
Digital art is fluid. This is because it changes photography physically. It allows us to remove, add, or change any aspect of an image. An example of this would be the mugshot of OJ Simpson on Time magazine where they edited the image to appear darker in order to change the rhetoric of the photo. Thousands, maybe even millions of people saw this image, but only a couple hundred may have realized it was edited. Being able to edit images allows people to create any situation they want. As Ritchin explains however, this is not necessarily a bad thing because images have always been used to push one agenda or another. There is always intention behind a picture and with the advent of digital art that intention is now easier than ever to see plainly. A photo is not any more or less capable of showing reality than any other medium of ideas. People understand that words do not always tell the truth, but they are capable of being true as well. The same is true of videos and pictures as well. Just because we are able to edit pictures now does not make them less credible than before, it just means people have to think about what they picture is saying and then question whether or not it is reality, like they do when reading a news article. The invention of digital art has allowed people to say exactly what they wish to say with their pictures. Like writing a book photographers can now depict visual representations of the world as they see it and share with the community things they deem to be of great, or little importance. It is not quite as simple as this though because many people are not literate when it comes to pictures. Advertisements are meant to make people feel a certain way without expressly telling them. An example would be Axe where they show women next to a man who uses Axe body spray and this implies that women will like a man if he uses that body spray. People should be educated to read photographs so we can all experience photography as the medium of communication it is.
Pioneer Plaque
The technology we are trying to convey to the aliens are GIFs, which is a file in which multiple images are placed in order to create a short looping animation. To do this we decided to orient the images on the plaque in such a way that they could be read in any direction, and we did this because the heptapods have radial symmetry and multiple eyes throughout their body. We wanted the image to convey that it is a small looping animation and to do this we used dots to show motions. We used a ball falling since gravity, while it varies in intensity across the universe, is everywhere. Because of this, falling is a principle of physics that all beings should be able to understand. The first thing we did was break the animation into multiple frames and then connect them to the central image using lines. We considered using arrows to depict direction, but we felt that it was very human oriented, so we opted for using dots instead. To depict motion, we showed the ball taking the place of the dots as it falls. We then put dots in between each frame to indicate that they are connected and feed into one another. Since the Heptapods read everything at once it was important for them to be able to take in the whole image at once, in order for them to discern what the meaning of the image was. It is for this reason that we did not put anything in a straight line because the anatomy of their bodies does not enable them to be able to easily read in a linear fashion like humans do. We also wanted to display that this technology is electronic, so we decided to depict a screen with the GIF on it. To show that the screen utilized electricity to operate. We depicted a hydrogen atom because it is the simplest and the most common atom throughout the universe with only one proton and one electron. They would almost certainly be familiar with this atom especially if they are as advanced as they seem in the reading. We zoomed in on the electron in order to emphasize its importance then we showed the electrons being fed into the computer to depict power being put into a screen. We used electrons because they are negatively charged and the natural electricity in the universe comes from negative ions. Therefore it is likely they would be able to understand that we power our devices by taking advantage of the energy of negatively charged ions, because they would have experienced similar electrical phenomena in space.
10 Colors
