So apparently my photo site has been spammed by german and norwegian servers, and ended up overing my bandwidth limit, so my portfolio website is gone for now. Don’t click photos up there top right, it won’t take you anywhere.
In other news, I updated my about page and artist statement, and the layout of the website too.
I’m going to start working on creating my own layout soon, and make it easier to navigate, and focus more on my recent artwork as a portfolio website.
So it had taken me awhile to figure out the right mixture to achieve a good, fluffy bread that doesn’t crumble to bits, and is still good after a day or two. This is a sweet raisin bread, but I’m not one that likes very sweet breads, so I went pretty conservative on the sugar.
In other news, I’ve got a facebook connecting commenting system up, so check that out, and see if it runs by commenting, eh? Thanks!
recipe after the jump, or download the rtf here
Thought this was a very interesting thing to see, seems small but they are all over the world… slightly more expensive strings than most, but worth it as you can see. I’d like to learn how to make strings, such a specialty thing! I’d recommend actually visiting youtube for this one, or going fullscreen.
I don’t know what to blog about, so I’ll just talk about what I’m working on currently. I’ve been trying to work on my drawing, but that’s crawling like an ant, so I won’t get into that. I’ve been drawing together an expandable solar food dehydrator which would be a nice addition to the house being built for my ‘rents. I made the whole thing stackable, which is an idea I’m proud of thinking of for some reason, since the overall design is rather the same. Furthermore, I’m making a bed for my parents, so all in all I need to get a ton of wood and a bunch of tools.
I’m also trying to make a piezo-electric pickup for my ukulele, so I can hook it up to an amp. Turns out I can get all the materials from radioshack for less than 10 bucks and put it together myself, while the same thing already built is being sold in the music store for about 60 bucks. Fantastic. DIY!!!
Hawaii is a wonderful place, but I can’t help but miss my friends. Working on projects with my friends this summer would have been ideal, but alas, I will only be back in hometown citadel for only half a month.
On another note I’ve been seeing really strangely psychological dreams about people from elementary school, and their behaviors, mannerisms, activities… I feel like I know more about them now than I did back then. Strange epiphany-esque stuff.
It all started in a dark blue mini-van, like one you could see a mother driving. She drove us to grade school, where the chain linked fence was as tall as always, and we never knew that it kept us in; silent black guardians. Then there was the concrete pavement, as large as it seemed compared to our bodies then. If it took us 5 minutes to cross that plain playground, I wonder if it would take me that long today. Probably not. Then those doors designed to keep weirdos out, though we didn’t know it then -we just felt it made the school look more like a prison. We had to knock on the door to have one of those friendly administrative ladies to let us in.
I was entering the gym, a miniaturized version of a theater now, I don’t know how many coats of polyurethane on that wood floor but this place felt like a happy friend, pleased to see me again. Mr. Rodriguez, the 7th grade science teacher smile stretches across the room as he shakes my hand, “Emiliano!!!” that’s not my name, but I smile politely. I raise my eyebrows at a nearby girl holding back laughter, we smile at his mistake, that’s Sarah. I walk past and I’m happy to see my girlfriend getting along well with my grade school friends. As she stands talking, her smile radiates to me, like a red beacon saying “this is where you are!” and I feel proud of who I am, proud of her.
Then I feel it, the silent judging stares and looks of all the people in the room. The interesting thing about a grade school reunion is that we all, involuntarily separated by graduation, knew each other at some point in time. We all knew a premature version that we were comfortable (or not) with each other. So even now, we return to our pre-historic selves. Maybe because we’d like to feel more like a child sometimes, or because that’s the only way we know how to interact. In other words, I went back to my silent-type, randomly mischievous self.
Then I woke up.
My portfolio needs a serious revamping. Those works are so old, and I haven’t necessarily been very good at taking new photos lately, especially with school. I just pulled up some recent but still old pictures to compensate. This summer is going to be a very… artistic one, hopefully.
On my todo list: Learn processing, and make cool things with it; Draw every day, something to improve my drawing skills; Study a bit on stage lighting, and maybe write a play or find one to direct in the fall; make a geodesic dome with bamboo and/or make a solar cooker; and lastly, learn some tasty recipes.
But we all know how summer plans go…
So my assignment for my art class called for a 20th century artist redone in 21 century form, with cultural context of today involved in some form. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, eh? Jeanne-claude and Christo do these huge scale projects which often involve wrapping or covering a large proportion of building or sky (respectively) with polyester vinyl or some sort of specific fabric.
So I take into hand the idea of the Mumford House on campus here, and the controversies that lie behind it. The controversy is that it once was a model farm house with some people living in it, and eventually they had to move out when the university said they were putting this area right in the middle of the university. Well they didn’t want to move out, but instead decided to donate the land to the university, as long as they kept the house somewhere on campus. Years and years later, the university decided it wanted to put shit there, so they had the argument of trying to move the farm house to south areas where there are actual farms and it might have some use there, but the historical preservation people here fought to keep it here, as it would degrade the house, as well as ruin the house’s historical status.
Currently the building is slowly decaying and is not in use. Some sources said that in one summer the heat was left on, and degraded all the walls and the insides are peeling.
To bring attention to this brilliant piece of history and perhaps create more controversy, I decided to make a presentation J-C & Christo style with a model that I made as well as a digital painting of the landscape.
(click to enlarge)
(here’s what the area looks like)
My half sketch/photo montage.
Here’s a comparison from the originals:
My full sketch of the area:
final thoughts: it took a long time to figure out how to make that vinyl look… like vinyl. I had to do a physical painting before realizing that I could do this better with sketchbook pro.
I thought this website was worth the note, especially since I’ve been in love with it since first finding it. The interesting thing about information is that it can be organized in several different ways, some, which can be incomprehensible, but data, like nature, has inherent structure, which if you use it for good… can be pretty damn awesome.
link: Information Is Beautiful
This seems to be the epitome of my current life direction –toward the culmination of all my interests, bringing together art and information, or simply giving meaning to words and numbers (not that they don’t have a meaning already) in visual form, so we can appreciate the patterns that we mimic from nature. Our social memes are not so different from patterns found in nature –in fact, I think they’re exactly the same. But their contexts are different, and beautiful in each sense; what we can achieve is better.
Luke and I had a cool idea for music, where in the last several number of years, a diagram is drawn, with circles indicating melodic patterns. So much of our popular music is similar in the sense that most of the songs follow a certain melody, for example, pachabel’s cannon famous 8 note, found in a lot of different songs. A beat would play in the background of this dynamic infographic, and as you mouseover the melodies, which are differentiated by size (popularity/number of times found in songs of that year) and by year, the melody will play to the beat. Furthermore, you can adjust the tempo of the beat on the page, to search for different songs at different melodies.
Doesn’t sound like a bad idea… as soon as I finish learning Java, maybe I’ll venture to creating dynamic infographics with Flash or Html 3.0
I did a quick poster for my theater friends back in high school… unfortunately this is the web, and cmyk colors look terrible. I tried to convert the colors as much as I could to rgb, and with good enough resolution, but I guess you get the idea.
Previously I made a much more simple, perhaps too mature of a theme for the idea of the play, which was more beige and used a color noise mask to make it look a little older and colorful. Still it was too “clean” looking for the play. The idea they had was for the poster to reflect a sort of “super-hero comic” style, which I’m not exactly used to, so it made sense to make something that represents a book cover, but not too intense for the sake of not making it look cheesy. Anyway, hope y’all like it.
This links back to flickr, and a larger size is there too.
also, if you’re in Chicago, you should go see it!
//Edit: this is the trailer for the Stonehenge theater… er… was//
as always, click to expand.
lunch
As I was playing with some macro, I thought these were interesting to share… might make for a good photoshop brush or texture background.
Stuff like that. Cranking out, since my intercollege transfer application is due soon, thinking of new things to put in…