On Media, New and "Old"

I made this as a part of a the "United By Edit" logo competition on Instagram.  No photos were used (or harmed) in the making of this image.

Ever feel like you are a social movement of one?  I know the feeling.  And of course, the irony of those two sentences is that they contradict: If there's two of us, we are no longer alone.

Click to enlarge to see a bit of my process in making this.

Now that we've limbered up with a little verbal calisthenics, let me get to my point.  I feel like I am waging a private war at times against the presuppositions of photography in  online image sharing.  The preponderence of sites (Twitpics, Flickr, Instagram, Picasa, etc.) default in their language to the idea of sharing photography, when a cursory glance through people's feeds suggests something more interesting is going on here. 

On Instagram, I participate in groups like #we_edit and #unitedbyedit, formed in part in response to photography groups who regularly criticize "too much honey" in a photo edit.  But even in these groups, photography is not always the base.  Plenty of folks are working with digital graphics apps and software that allow them to render from scratch or modify other captured content (preferrably open source or Creative Commons, but admittedly, not always). 

Actually began as a photo, but made to look painted.

Then too, many apps and software packages still predominantly identify their filters and effects by the ways they (roughly!) approximate darkroom procedures for retouching photographs.  "Burn," "dodge," "vignette," "HDR," "Orton," and so forth have become common parlance in digital photo editing -- although the results are often quite different from their print photography analogues.

Now don't get me wrong: I am not against digital photography or its imitations of its analogue ancestor.  And I see the value, on paper or on screens, of the minimally edited photograph.  But as we celebrate the ways tablet and smartphone technologoes are opening up people's creativity and generating "new" art movements (c.f. "iPhoneography"), I think it behooves us not to be too beholden to the familiar and to acknowledge the plethora of image creating possibilities these tools allow.

I think the real inovation of these tools is less the camera (although that is part of it, but certainly also available on lower IQ phones) than the screen.  The screen is increasingly how we frame our shots (as opposed to the analogue and early DSLR view finder).  It is also where we edit and view most images (since only very few of us print out our pics, and then only very few those, relatively speaking).  But it is also where we forgo the camera entirely to use stylus or finger to draw, paint, clip, and blend images.

So, there's a photo of a drawing in this one?

So what are the better terms?  What is a little less beholden to the way things were, a little more responsive to extant practice, and a little more visionary for the future.  Increasingly, I use "pic" (the online-savvy abreviation of "picture")  or "image" when talking about the images I create and share.  These may be photographs, may include photographic elements, or may never have involved a lens in the process at all.  I also object to "edit" as the default term for image manipulation since it implies some photographic original that I am revising and reworking, some qualitative distinction between making an image and revising it.  Instead of "edit," maybe we should call this work "pixel pushing."  Leaving aside vector graphics for the moment, "pushing" seems to capture both the sense of moving and also the sense of transforming through filters the basic structure of the digital image: the pixel.  "Pixel pushing" captures the idea of edit and of paint, and it frees us from the erroneous perception that we are engaged in anything really like darkroom editing.

Maybe this is all just a matter of semantics.  The "photo" in "Photoshop" hasn't stopped artists from using it even when they don't have a photograph to build on.  More people use Instagram than those using digital "Instamatics" or their imitators.  And every time someone complains about someone else's aesthetic or use of a tool, the offender tends to form communities as reaction formations to arbitrary rules.  Making art is frequently about breaking rules and using tools in ways other than they were intended.  No harm, no foul.

Click to enlarge some of the steps.

Even so, now might be a time to lift up our heads and take a good look at what is going on.  Something is changing in our capacity to make and circulate images.  The camera in your phone that is also a phone that is also a powerful computer....is also a powerful digital arts studio.  This combinatory morphing, this portability, and this digital ephemerality of the final work is creating truly new media, something that owes much to the predecessors we can name but something also significantly different.  With or without the social movement of one or many, our practices are leading the way into fascinating territory. 

Your Heart of Hearts.  Made with a digital brush made from a heart diagram.  
Happy Valentines Day!

Variations on a Starbucks Coffee Cup

I've been playing around on Instagram, where a new friend (@ashcroft54 who blogs at http://ashcroft54.com) posted a picture of a Starbuck's coffee cup and invited edits of the image. We call these invitations "challenges" or sometimes "pimps." It's a social media game that has been nourishing my soul lately. Here are a few of my edits:




My first inclination was to transform the logo into something else. The first thing that came to mind was the biohazard symbol. Don't know why, exactly. I like coffee. But it sometimes seems like a "toxic brew" to me. What followed? Well, something mutant-like, of course. Tentacles made sense. And from there, it only seemed right to tweak the visual style toward comicbook.




The next day, I was still captivated with the idea of tweaking the logo and seeing where that took me. I also felt the need for a visual pun. I grabbed an open source image of Kara Thrace (a.k.a. "Starbuck") from Battlestar Galactica. I then tweaked it into a few shades of green and a coffee-chain-esque art nouveau style. A few Cylon light-effects later and I had my take on a Starbuck Starbucks. So say we all!




Next day and I felt the need to keep the logo but lose the cup. I spent a lot of time isolating the logo and looking at it. Finally, the idea of plankton came to me, and I knew I had an idea worth playing with. It was also fun adding some different colors and offset depth to the flat green Starbucks logo.




Today, I started an edit based on removing the cup entirely and working with the grid pattern on the table top. Once I had the empty plane, I was at a loss for what to put on it. Then I happened to turn the logo upside down, and I saw the pig face in it. The rest was simply a matter of pulling that image out and giving the overall composition some engaging texture.

I am finding as the semester winds up that digital graphics are a way to relax and get out of my school brain. I'm loving the edit communities on Instagram. It took a while to find them, but now I am addicted -- which may or may not be a metaphor. But I love the touch screen as a tool and toy for seeing and re-seeing with my fingers. And in the end, they take me to magical places where creepy is most definitely cool.

New Year, New Possibilities

No question, 2011 was a bear of a year!  It was a year of overcommitment for me, and I let too many things fall by the wayside as I struggled and failed to meet too many of those commitments.  It was a year of loss, a year of struggle.  It had its high points, and they were great. But it had its deep, deep lows -- as much in the broad strokes as in the specific moments.

The year began with forcing my mother to deal with deteriorating mental capacity that required putting her, against her will, into a home.  It was soon followed by the sudden death of a close and young colleague, who went from diagnosis to death from cancer in under a month.  My old friend, writers block, returned with its usual neurotic and hard-to-explain-to-others inability to write in certain contexts.  It brought an unwanted friend, an excruciating difficulty with responding to students' writing that made me not very good at my job. It was the year I had to go on strike to protect that job, and in the process engaged in a polarizing social drama on my campus.  And it was a year where economic downturn served as the cover for retrograde policy on all the things that matter most to me and should matter most to all of us. 

But pain and frustration were not the only qualities of this year.  After all, it began with an engaging and successful social media art project that earned me a few lines in an ARTNews article this summer.  It was the year I had a regular comic strip for a few months until the collaborative blog died a mysterious death.  It was the year I used my cartooning and other talents to great effect for that strike effort.  It was the year I figured out Instagram and found an amazing online community of similarly-minded net artists.  It was the year I published an art comic in a literary journal.  It was a great year for travel and performance: Maine, New Mexico, North Carolina, Louisiana, Alaska.  It was the year my mother got a little better and managed to move herself into an assisted living community more to her liking.

I came into the holiday break flying on fumes, exhausted by the good and the bad of it all.  I made a minimal effort at holiday celebrations with the ones I love most.  Mostly, I hid in the bed covers, watched movies, and made art for my Instagram feed (the images in this post are a result of that holiday "labor").  I avoided leaving the house and going onto Facebook.  I told myself this was all necessary, that I needed the time off, the serious down-time.  I told myself it can't be all bad if I'm making art, right? 

The New Year is here, and I hope it will be better than the last.  I have a sabbatical coming (hopefully) in the second half of it.  I have arts projects (performance, comics, digital graphics, etc.) planned that I think will be fulfilling.  I get to teach a graduate seminar this spring that I am very excited about.  And at the end of the year looms the next great global fantasy of the end of the world -- or its great awakening into new consciousness. 

I write this today on my lunch break in my office at school.  I am digging in to try to catch-up and get over the the damage done last semester and last year.  But I pause to breathe, to resuscitate this blog, to make it my companion again for what I think, I hope will be a truly good year.   We are, all of us, damaged a bit by this world.  We are all of us making the best of it.  I remind myself that, while my end-of-year time of rest was needed and welcome, little else is achieved from isolation.  If 2012 is going to be a good year, we are going to have to make it so together.  So, I am back, rolling up my sleeves, ready to get to work. 

Call this the art of living.

Consider that an oblique yet hopeful resolution.

Been a While

There's a total meltdown at school.  We're days away from a potential strike.  And yet somewhere in there I find the time not only to do the usual semester overload of work but to enjoy a little art exchange on Instagram.  Enjoy a few pics from my exchanges there.  And maybe I'll find a way to get back to Bungy Notin' too.

From my Instagram feed (these are all made with applications on my iPad):

And if you are interested in the labor conflicts at SIUC, I'm blogging now over at Deo Volente.  "God willing," I am finding appropriate and useful applications of my digital skills there, as well.