Chapter 3 Response

A theme that is fascinating to me related to digital art is gaming. With technology rapidly changing, it is interesting to see the similarities and differences between the first generation of video games and current games on the market today. Many of the older systems are difficult to find because there is very little demand for older technologies. 

Games incorporate many digital elements: visual images, created environments, interactivity between users, and now gaming consoles are connected to the internet which adds a new player-to-player aspect of voice, picture and video communication.

For me, video games are a great way to explore a form of digital art and entertainment. It was interesting to see the examples in Chapter 3 because they were not the actual games, but modified versions that incorporated new elements and interpretations from the artist. 

The Quake modification by Chinese artist Feng Mengbo shows the artist in the game, equipped with a weapon and a camcorder (Paul 201). He uses the original Quake environment and “populates it with an army of his clones that can be played by the audience (or the artist himself)” (Paul 203). This is something that as a gamer would be awesome to see – yourself in the game.

The artistic talent involved in creating video games is of a very high caliber and I have the utmost respect for all the people involved in the design and programming. Many of the characters that have been created (even older characters such as Mario) are commonly known and still talked about today. It shows that this form of art has a huge and long-lasting impact on a population that is immersed in the digital age.

Work Cited:

Christiane Paul. Digital Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Project 3: Math = Beauty

Project 3: Process

Math = Beauty.

In this project, I wanted to embrace the digital with the theme and expression of fractals conveying the beauty of math. The great Greek artist, Polykleitos, created the Doryphoros (spear bearer) to convey the beauty of mathematical ratios found in the human form. 


I try never to quote wiki-type sources, but here is what wikipedia has to say about fractals -- which I thought was put very well:

"A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity. Roots of the idea of fractals go back to the 17th century. The term fractal was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured." A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion. There are several examples of fractals, which are defined as portraying exact self-similarity, quasi self-similarity, or statistical self-similarity. While fractals are a mathematical construct, they are found in nature, which has led to their inclusion in artwork."

Here are a few natural examples of fractal like images (found from google):

Basically it is a rendering of numbers in a digital and visual way. In nature viewing a shell or a tree branch one can see a "fractal." There are different kinds of fractals, and different "flames" that create them. 

I decided to use a new program on my Mac rather than a program I found a few years ago that is on my PC. I used "Oxidizer" to render the flames used in my collection. I took these rendered flames into Photoshop and cut out all of the background and made it transparent so I could take the image and lay it over other appropriated images while creating my final pieces. After putting two images together, I adjusted the colors, saturation and layout of the raw files used. Once I had something I liked, I saved the file, and created a 3-D shape in Photoshop from the image I made. Then I took this shape and pasted it back on the complied images. After I put it with the main image I added a "plastic wrap" filter and an outer glow. I also used almost transparent black rectangles to add a little more depth.

Below are the images and screenshots used for the creation of these pieces:

(^this is the only fractal image I used that was made by someone else^)

I used google to get the background image (circuit board) and the Metroid background. 

Link for Oxidizer for Macs

Chapter 2 Response

When discussing installations in the book Digital Art, Christiane Paul says, “Many are aimed at creating ‘environments’ that can entail varying degrees of immersion (71).” The main areas in which these installations differed are the balance between the realms of the physical and the virtual and also the methods that were used to transform one realm into the other (Paul 72).

One of the installations I thought was interesting was Jeffrey Shaw’s “landmark piece” The Legible City (Paul 72). In this work he setup a bike in front of a projection screen and connected both to a computer. The input device was the bicycle itself and on the screen was projected text mimicking a city. The viewer/cyclist would peddle and move about a city created entirely of words of varying sizes that corresponded to the height of the buildings in the actual city it was representing.

There were three versions mentioned in the chapter: Manhattan (1989), Amsterdam (1990), and Karlsruhe (1991).  I thought another great element and interesting element in this installation was that in the later two versions the artist was able to scale the letters to make them correspond with the actual buildings they were replacing (Paul 72). The text itself was also very unique in all the versions. The first one, Manhattan, complied text and it was “presented in the form of fictional monologues by Manhattanites (Paul 72).” In the last two, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe, the text was “from archive documents describing historical events (Paul 72).”

The most interesting aspect of this piece for me is the connection to today’s interactive game consoles where the players movements guide the game play, just as in this installation the viewers movements guide the path of the bike around the city. I would like to see the Wii or Xbox come out with a cycling game. After all, it’s not that much different than riding a “bike” in the gym – just way more fun and entertaining! It is awesome how far digital art has come and continues to evolve. 

Work Cited:

Christiane Paul. Digital Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003.