Stop Motion Video

Textured Self Portrait

Photoshop Homework

"Cockamamie Event"

"Composite Image"

Video Response

Today in class, we watched a few videos on the appropriation of images/ideas and copyright infringement. The first video focused on the idea that our generation of teens works with appropriation of images more than any generation has ever before.  The talk show host showed funny examples of how people have taken videos and matched them up with different songs to change the meaning.  Another video showed a news story on how a 16-year-old girl's picture was taken from flickr and used in a Virgin Mobile ad campaign.  We were also shown another example of how Gap made an Illustrator version of an image from someone's flickr account online and appropriated it on their clothing.  All of these examples, particularly the second and third, bring up the issue of copyright infringement and raise many questions on what is crossing the line.  I think that in both the Gap and Virgin Mobile ad cases, lines were definitely crossed.  Although these images were put up on flickr, where they can be viewed by any random person surfing the internet, there should have been some consent by the people whose images were being used in the process. The 16-year-old girl, in my opinion, was definitely taken advantage of not only because she didn't even know that her picture was being used in the campaign, but also because she's not even of legal age yet.  Also, the ads included insulting texts next to her picture which is a whole other problem within itself.  Everyone has their own personal rights, and her rights were definitely violated.  The Gap example is a little more hazy because it's not certain that their image and the flickr image are absolutely the same image, but they are extremely eerily similar.  I don't think that this example is as big of a deal though because it wasn't literally the same exact image as the one on flickr, but I definitely don't think it's fair that the Gap can go ahead and take someone else's image without being given consent and probably still win in court, when it would never work the other way around.  I don't think that the first example is crossing the line really on the other hand because in this example, people are taking two completely different things and setting them in a new context.  It makes me think of how in art, nothing is really ever completely unique because everyone gets their ideas from somewhere.  General ideas in artwork have been repeated over and over again throughout time but have been changed accordingly.  One of the things I thought of was how in art history, we have been learning about religious art from the Italian Renaissance and how so many paintings were produced portraying biblical scenes and figures, but how despite having the same subjects, the paintings are still different from artist to artist.  Also, just in the foundations program in our studio classes, we are allowed to take images from the internet and use them in our projects and sketchbooks, or draw from them for drawing class, or model our idea off of something from the internet for 3D.  A lot of times, there is a clear different in between two different works using the same image.  And again, ideas for original images had to be taken from somewhere.  This also reminded me of an artist named Jeff Koons, who makes humungous sculptures of every day mundane objects.  One of his works was a huge shiny sculpture of a balloon dog.  Some time after, a bookstore in California started selling balloon dog bookends.  Koons sued the bookstore for stealing his idea and in the end, he only won a dollar or something like that off of his case.  This to me is just silly because it is clear that Koons didn't invent the balloon dog; he got the idea from somewhere.  Overall, I just think that people take ideas and images from each other and the internet as well every day but it's not always wrong if they set said ideas/images in a new context  to create different meaning.

Scanner Face Computers Assignment

For this assignment, we had to scan our face and then recreate it in Illustrator using the pen tool. This assignment was the first time I've ever really done a big project on Illustrator but I had a lot of fun doing it. It was interesting figuring out how to make the face look more realistic with different shapes and colors, scales, and opacity. I learned a lot of new things including how to use the pen tool, changing colors, opacity, arranging objects, zooming, etc. Overall, I enjoyed this assignment a lot.

Illustrator Assignment 1

Representational, Non-representational, Expressive, Abstract

Computers Assignment: Week 2