Saturday, December 12, 2015

Utopia Documentation



We took a video of the app being used in real time to show what our project ended up looking like. We were incredibly pleased with how it turned out. The fruits of our labor definitely paid off.

2015 Combined Student Exhibition Review

Sadly, I am embarrassed to say, this was my first venture to one of these combined student shows. That being said, I was really impressed with this exhibition. A lot of the student artwork that made it into the show was marvelous. There was nice coverage of a number of different mediums as well, this provided a nice variety in the works.

There was a projector that had some video works playing on loop, one of these projects was a recreation of the Martha Rolser's piece "Semiotics in the Kitchen", which the recreation turned out very well. Paintings lined the opposite walls, there was one that stood out among the rest. This painting pulled heavy influence from popart and the comic book style. The subject matter of this painting being three males very close and surrounding one erect penis. The whole exhibition was separated into three rooms, with each room having a theme. This first room involved works that were about the body.

The second room had much more abstract works, another video piece and some more paintings and some sculptures.

Probably one of my favorite pieces out of the exhibition was the only piece in the third room. It was a stegosaurus that was built out of cardboard panels. The paneling had oil company logos spray painted on them, which gave the dino a wonderful aesthetic. The stegosaurus was close to twenty ft long and about ten ft high. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was little, so seeing something like this in my collage career hit me with some nostalgia.

Overall, the works in the exhibition showed off how talented a lot of the universities students are in a variety of mediums. It was a great experience and allowed me to see some of the creative work our university has to offer.

Kevin Chen Artist Talk

The day Kevin Chen had his talk was also the day I had an off campus field trip for my last class, which caused me to be just late enough to miss his introduction and see him began to start introducing one of the exhibitions he curated. I honestly didn't even know his name at this point and was really confused when he was just talking about other peoples work. I obviously figured it out, but dang, what a confusing intro.

The exhibition Chen was discussing was absolutely fascinating. I love maps a great deal and was in awe with what the artists were doing with them. The amount of detail and uniqueness in each one was something else. I really enjoyed the idea having data driven maps and the things produced were visually intriguing and it was great seeing data being represented in a way that allowed it to be displayed in a gallery and featured in an exhibition. The variety of the artwork too, was something spectacular. Another piece of art work that really stuck out was the magic spinning table. Being a digital media student, I am always interested in the way artists are taking new technologies and interacting with them. This artwork really showed how much more we can get out of existing platforms by being a bit more creative and applying a "filter" so to speak. The application of forcing people to look at something they have been using for one purpose from an entirely different perspective is fascinating to me. This is something that really inspires me and gets me excited about the potential digital art has.

Kevin Chen's personal art caught me off guard. I was not expecting something like that to come from him, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Having started out with graphite myself, its refreshing to see graphite art making into galleries. Chen's focus on scale opened my eyes to what manipulating scale can actually do for an artwork. I also appreciated his drawings and his ideas of these super cities built from all sorts of different architectural styles. The combination made for a great visually appealing piece.

Clicks and Pops Artist panel

This was my first my experience with an artist panel here at UNR and it was actually rather inspiring.
The panel was made up of Louis Niebuhr (Musicology), Jean-Paul Perrotte (Music Theory and Composition),  Robert Morrison(Profesor Emeritus Sculpture, UNR) and Tohm Judson (Composition and Digital Media). I think the professors on the panel where a nice concentrated group of individuals that really showed the diverse areas of music research that UNR covers and having Tohm there really provided a nice diversity in opinions and perspective that I thought made the for a better well rounded discussion. They were all very knowledgeable on their respective areas of focus and were passionate about those areas.

My favorite part of the panel was listening to Tohm Judson talk about his work and his perspective on being outside academia. I think this is a view that is extremely important to students, especially digital media students, because he was discussing the possibilities someone has to do professional art in a digital medium setting and how you can be successful in that practice.


The other professors had a lot of great things to say and you could see how each individual viewed their subject material and how that produced their current viewpoint. Though it was odd for me to see Robert Morrison on the panel, as I have had a drawing class from him and it was predominantly focused on perspective. Also knowing that his background is in sculpture, though he did bring in some interesting points on how music and sculpture can interact and become a piece together. I guess he was another outlier in terms of major focus on music.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Model Update

The critique Mason and I went through last Monday was very helpful. We received a lot of great stuff, but most notably that it seemed out concept was confusing and muddled. So we have taken this week to start from scratch and rework our concept and model in order to push what kind of message we want to get across. This gave us some new found inspiration and really allowed us to zero in and push an idea. We decided that we wanted to push into a world that is entirely dependent on oil as an energy source.

Using this image as our reference to model  from.

Monday, November 16, 2015

3D View of WIP Model


Augmented reality update!

We are arriving at the last stages of our model and will be spending the majority of the rest of the semester working on getting it to map right in real space. We will are working on getting a couple more ads into the model, just figuring out placement.










Monday, November 2, 2015

Technical Rider

Art 451 Problems in Digital Media
Fall 2015



YOUR NAME(S): Zachary Cordisco and Mason Furr


TITLE OF PIECE: Utopia


MEDIUM: Mobile Augmented Reality


DESCRIPTION:  

Our project is a site specific piece that will involve the manipulation of the site through augmented reality. The goal is to render the corner of fourth and sierra, when facing the silver legacy, of downtown Reno. We are choosing to model a society that is balancing on hope and fear. We would like to depict a civilization just before the apocalypse happens.

PREFERED SPACE:


The work will be location specific. The corner of fourth and Sierra facing towards the Silver legacy will be our subject matter.  

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

In order to view our work, the user will need to have a smartphone with gps and to have downloaded the app called “Layar”.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Post Critique thoughts

After critique/status updates today, we got some feedback to approach the remodeling of the building from a different perspective. Instead of apocalypse styled broken down things, we are going to attempt to push into an area that is "Just before" the apocalypse happens. We are going for a feel of hope AND fear in the things we create, in order to really bring something new to the apocalypse thing that has been done over and over. This will provide a new challenge for me because I now get to approach these buildings in a whole new perspective and really push my imagination to see where it goes.

Updates for 3D AR

 We have established a spot where we would like to make our piece from. We are using the corner of 4th and Sierra due to its great view of a multitude of ads and some its very nice iconic architecture to model things differently from. Below are base models of how the intersection will be built in 3D, as well as pictures of what the audience will be looking at and which ads with be altered and changed.










Monday, October 19, 2015

Project Shift - Augmented Reality

Alrighty, so the whole evolution project thing, as I moved farther along with it, turned out that the details I was going to attempt to represent would be too subtle to get people to recognize. Though it lead me to the next project idea! Mason and I have joined forces to work on an Augmented Reality project that will bring augmented reality to a corner of downtown Reno. I will be turning that corner into a post apocalyptic Reno, an overgrown and broken down not to distant future. Mason will be taking the advertisements on these buildings and altering them into things that could be advertised in a not too distant future.

We are using a program called Layar. Joe showed us a workshop here and we are using that as our foundation on how to achieve our goal.

We had some issues when following the workshop because it required us to use some backend website stuff that was way over our heads, but with some persistence we got it working.

Some issues we are expecting to run into is that the model render isn't staying in one place and its rather jittery, so setting up a way for to present this for the user and allowing it to be the same experience every time is going to be tricky.

We will be going to downtown this week to get photos and look at reference points and plan out where the user should be to experience what we want them to.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Augmented Reality 2D Examples

My partner Mason and I have been working with Layar, an augmented reality app. For a demonstration of its 2D AR capabilities, we have done some things to the following pictures. So download the app and scan these photos to get a taste of the 2D world of Augmented Reality.



Sunday, September 27, 2015

In progress wolf project

I decided to tweak the project just a hair in how I was going to present it. Instead of showing one wolf in a standing position, I have decided to go with a render of a pack taking down a caribou. I figured this would give the audience a more exciting preview.



Monday, September 21, 2015

Speculative evolution project

The idea behind this project was to take an easily identifiable animal of today and use its evolutionary history to project what might happen to it in the future if we do not fix climate change. The first animal I chose was a dog, but I very soon realized there isn't just one dog I could choose. I then went back to all dogs first know ancestor, which brought me to the gray wolf.

I then began to look into its habitat, diet, and evolutionary history to determine what changes it has gone through over its time on earth. With habitat in mind, the research on where climate change would effect lead me to read that the tundra will began greening, directly contributing to a rise in caribou and deer. Wolfs do not hunt caribou as often as deer, if they are going for a caribou then it will be weak or sick. If there is a rise in large caribou, nature is going to need something to keep that population in check so I applied the evolutionary history of the wolf to this scenario. Wolfs will need to get bigger to take down more of a such a large animal, their teeth will need to grow larger due to the way a pack hunts, loss of fur density due to the warming climate, fur color change due to the greening environment, and larger paws for hunting larger prey.

I am still getting the hang of Zbrush and Maya, so reaching the level of detail I have in my head has proved to be a great challenge.



Monday, August 31, 2015

Exhibition, Space, or Theme

I like the idea of taking art out of the exhibition space and putting it somewhere else, an idea I was playing around with was using the forest or lake scenery we have so accessible to us. Or finding a place to show our work that is very odd and out of place, I believe it could bring a nice contrast to our digital projects.

First Individual Project Idea

I have always been fascinated with evolution and the way it alters things. I would like to push my 3D modeling to a new level and attempt to do two renderings of two different species based on two different directions the earth's environment could move: If we fix our impact on climate change and if we do not fix climate change. 

I would use the animals previous evolutionary history to base my speculation from, taking into account what changed in the environment to emphasize the changes the animal underwent. I would like to take animals that have an easily identifiable form to really push the evolutionary changes that would take place. 

I believe this could pull some attention to how our environmental impact doesn't just effect humans. I've considered looking at how humans could potential evolve or where our genetic engineering is going. 

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Exhibition: Tehching Hsieh

Having seen both exhibitions within the Shepard Contemporary gallery, shows me just how versatile that gallery can be. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the gallery was that the floor was tile and not carpet, which to me set a more serious tone for the space. The second thing I noticed was the framed documents on the wall directly as you walk in. These were some of the documentation for the other works of Hsiehs'. The piece that I was there to see was his "Time Clock" piece. When I went into the main part of the gallery, I was caught off guard with how it was presented. The time clock set up he used when he actually made the piece was replicated on and display. The thing that was most intriguing to me was that all of the pictures he took for every hour were lined up under the timecard for that day. Three hundred and sixty five columns were lined around the entire room. Something that caught my eye, when observing all of the pictures around me, were the pictures that seemed way darker then all the other ones. This caused me to think maybe the flash didn't go off right or the film was over developed or something of that nature. When standing in a space and looking at a collection of photos at that caliber really puts time into perspective. It was overwhelming. Trying to mentally comprehend what it took to complete that work is very challenging and awe inspiring and it really shows what can be done a determination like his. In the middle of the gallery was a table with the documentation of intent and the uniform he wore for the piece. It was incredibly humbling to experience this amount of work in a gallery here at UNR.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Exhibition: Pink Elephants on Parade

The exhibition that I was able to attend was the one being held inside the Shepard gallery. This exhibition was titled “Pink Elephants on Parade” and was created by the artist Nick van Woert.
Now as I attend my classes in the Church Fine Arts building on campus, I happen to use the stairs that go underneath the Shepard gallery space, so everyday I would be see one piece from this exhibition through the window overlooking the stair well. From my occasional glances towards that window, I formed an assumption that the piece was in conversation with the topic of fire and destruction. I arrived at this conclusion because through the window I could make out large dark gray objects that sort of billowed up and around a bright orange object. It wasn’t until I ventured into the gallery space that I realized how wrong I was.
To begin, none of Woert’s pieces are titled, so there is no hint to context or anything to give you a direction to take an interpretation. This piece that I had wrongly assumed was something about fire was actually a bright orange statue of a merman, my best guess would be Poseidon, with black wax being the billowing substance that I previously thought. I was particularly intrigued with how the wax was applied to the statue because when the statue was presented it seemed to defy gravity, which provided a wonderful movement and flow to the piece. The statue was placed face down on the ground and had hot black wax poured, dribbled, and lathered onto it. The wax also greatly surpassed the actual boundaries of the statue, providing this sort of great, over bearing feeling when you approach it. By doing this technique the wax created something that resembles frozen waterfalls all along the edges of the merman. The wax also created this network of pools that moved out and around the figure. The statue was then displayed facing upright, which caused all those waterfalls to suddenly be moving forward instead of toward the ground. This piece was an absolutely wonderful leading piece into this exhibition. 
The exhibition layout was also very interesting, seeing that all of the pieces were just set onto the floor, with one mounted on a wall. There wasn’t a designated path the viewer was set to walk through the exhibition, I was free to walk around any of the pieces I wanted. This gave me a very loose and unrestricted feeling as I moved about the space.
None of the pieces within the gallery space had an aesthetic that correlated, they were all vastly different from each other, which provided a dynamic viewing experience. The next, and my favorite, piece that I encountered was the one that was mounted on the wall. The piece left about three feet of space on top and bottom and was about five feet wide. It consisted of two metal frames that were mounted next to each other, each holding tree bark. The thing that fascinated me about this piece was that this tree bark was unmistakable from the the same section of a tree trunk, meaning that Woert some how managed to flatten the bark off a section of tree trunk and keep it seamless. The presentation of such a large section of bark was incredible. I had never seen flattened tree bark before and it was fantastic seeing something I had only ever seen parts of at a time, due to the curves of an actual tree, spread out flat and put on a wall.
Then moving off to my left there was what seemed like a giant piece of sponge corral with burns all over it. The way it was shaped resembled that of a wedge of cheese. This piece was odd and I am still not entirely sure how it was created. I moved from this piece to a giant black ball of asphalt with a metal rod sticking from both ends. This mound of asphalt again struck me as odd and I was intrigued as to how one would get a ball of asphalt that big and be able to get a pole protruding from both sides. The pristine shine of the asphalt was also appealing, it gave me a sort of “just off the shelf” manufactured feel. 
From the asphalt I moved over to what looked like a chair made from see-through glass containers filled with different solutions of sand. The sands were mixed and layered in a very earthy way, which gave the sculpture an interesting momentum, almost like it had been blown together by very fierce winds. Behind me and off to my left was something that resembled a chute of some kind. It was made out of solid metal, my guess was iron, which gave off a very mining old western feel to me. The piece itself had an interesting form, geometric, with pseudo moving parts. Something I came to appreciate with this one and was the welding work, it was beautifully layered and presented that I believe showed a great deal of craftsmanship. 
Moving again off to my left, I kind of spiraled through the pieces till I arrived in the middle, was  a group of pounded copper sheets that were welded together and resembled a mound. Again, the welding was wonderful and added an interesting dynamic when paired with the bright copper. The object itself didn't seem to have a specific form it intended to represent, but the materials aided its current form into something that was fairly appealing to look at. Finally I arrived at the network of steel tubes sitting in the middle of the space. My first thought was that they resembled car mufflers, a great deal of car mufflers. My second thought was that is looked very much like a rib cage, which was an odd combination of impressions. The welding was again very well done and I began to follow the tubes paths and I got lost within all of the bends and curves presented from all of the different tubes brought into this piece. Another unique installment from Woert. 

After I had seen and thought about all of the pieces I then began to crack the code that was what was the meaning of all of them? What was Woert trying to say? I arrived at a dialogue that involved natural resources and how we use them and also I thought that some of the pieces were making a commentary on the oil industry and its oil spills. The statue of Poseidon with all of the black wax around him and the burnt sponge were the foundation to that claim. All in all I really enjoyed the exhibition and thought it was very neat to see this kind of work presented in this way. 

Artist talk: Tehching Hsieh

I had never heard of this artist going into the talk which gave it an air of mystery and spiked my interest in what kind of art we were going to see from this artist. First thing I really noticed was that Tehchings' first language was not english. This didn't bother me at all but I knew down the line it could cause some problems when he tried to explain concepts behind his work. Tehching opened with a picture of a warrant for his arrest, seeing that he had entered the country illegally. This was one the best ways, I think, someone could have opened up an artists talk. Then he showed and explained what he was going to do for his first piece: He built a cage and declared that he was going to stay in this cage for one year. After seeing his documentation on the cage piece, it blew my mind how much determination he had. That was something I realized very soon about his work. The determination and dedication to his pieces was something I had never seen before. The aspect of time really struck me when he was talking and showing his work. An entire year is a long time and being able to do an art piece that involves being aware that the work isn't finished till that time has passed has got to have some sort of mental toll on someone. Then again he kept doing entire year pieces and was successful in all of them. Something else that fascinated me was that at the very end of his talk he showed everyone a picture of how eventually he would like all of his works displayed. He gave a distance equivalent to time. Forty feet equalled one year and everything else was derived from that equivalence. Forty feet. One year. The length doesn't seem to match up with that much time but Tehching mentioned that he viewer choses how much time they spend within the gallery space and that they ultimately choose the amount of time required to view each piece. This idea of giving time and space an equivalent is very intriguing to me. This perspective really has so many ways it can be interpreted and that is something that really left me in awe when I walked out of that talk. The determination, the concepts, and overall the relativity of time.

Artist Talk: Joel Swanson

Listening to Joel Swanson talk about his art was an interesting experience. He came from a graphic design background which initially sparked my interest, seeing what someone with that kind of background is making in the art world. One of the main things that really fascinated me about his work was his theme of language. The idea that language is this invisible barrier that forces a certain perception of the world based on which language the person speaks. Indexicality was another point he liked to do work on and again it reinforced just how driven and focused language makes a person. That was a new perspective I had never considered before, how controlled I was by the language I could speak. It was really neat seeing a concept like that applied into artwork, there were some very interesting conversations created. I also enjoyed that he addresses that fact that there are errors in language and he plays around with that idea to create some interesting pieces. His minimalistic approach was effective in that his art was very minimalistic but it also seemed to fail in some points at being interesting. The small repeating white neon signs or a single blinking white LED, while being concept heavy pieces, they left something to be desired on the visual end. The bits of code work he talked about really emphasized how powerful code can be and that was something close to a powerful observation I hadn't made before. He didn't have much work based on code but the ones he did have displayed a great deal of the versatility code has to offer. The possibilities are endless. I appreciated the new perspectives he offered and his interpretations of those perspectives.

Final Project


Artist Statement:
The University of Nevada, Reno recently implemented a program called 15 to finish that puts a requirement on certain financial aid options and on-campus jobs that makes it so a student must take 15 credits or more a semester in order to receive any of those benefits or work on campus. This is putting a great deal of unnecessary pressure on students in order for the university to get more funding based on its four year graduation rates. With my final, this was the more conceptual piece of artwork I believe I have ever made. I used a picture of our library to represent the quality of our education. I 3D modeled and printed the library and I also took that 3D model, textured it and animated it being built. I then light the model on fire with a blowtorch. The picture in the background represents the unmoving standard we have for our education: pristine and sharp. The next layer is the animated model being built, showing that at its core the university is a place that furthers the education of the people who attend it. The final layer is the burning of the printed 3D model with represents what we are currently doing to that standard by forcing people to take more credits each semester which in turn is causing one person to spread thin with the requirement of all the class work leading to a less impactful learning environment. The sounds I paired with the piece are the sounds of a 3D printer at work to represent the push for newer technology, the sounds of a construction site which ties to the fact that our campus always seems to be under construction and the final sound which is the sounds of a blowtorch burning a 3D model to emphasize what is happening to the quality of the students education. 

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Stop Animation Vignette


Artist Statement:

This was my first attempt at a stop motion video. We were tasked with 3D modeling and 3D printing that model to use as a prop within a vignette. If the model wasn't the main focus it had to have some other significant role within the piece. The vignette had to tell a narrative of our choice. Since I was going through some hard times when this project was assigned I wanted to tell a story of persistence and determination to keep getting back up and pushing on through. Sadly that deep concept was lost when my, what seemed to be an overly simplified, wandering story was finished. I chose a fox as the main character because fox's have a sort of whimsical background that follows them, as well as an air of mischief. I modeled the fox with two different leg positions to get an efficient walking effect when the frames were played at a lower frame rate. I built the set out of found materials to bring a sort of playful aspect to the video. Though in doing so it definitely brought in a childish aesthetic that might have taken away from the narrative. 

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Color Key exercise


Linked below is my first exercise with using the colorkey function in Adobe Premiere Pro. The video consists of two layers of my own footage, with one having the colorkey effect to remove the background.


Friday, March 6, 2015

Responding to Heidegger artist statement


Artist Statement
I was originally inspired to make this work like that of Tinguely, work that is designed to ultimately destroys itself. One of the challenges of designing a piece that will destroy itself is that of the timing, whether the piece will break instantly or take a great deal of time to wear out. It was discussed that there could be an interesting dynamic if the audience could work interact with it or if the project would die at a random time, which means it would be possible for it to die without anyone in the gallery. I decided to bring both into the construction of the work and in our in progress critique it wasn’t that well received. The work was annoying for a great deal of people and the interactivity only allowed them to turn it on or off, which most just turned it off. So with taking in some suggestions, the point of the piece took a turn. I decided to make the piece entirely for audience participation. I replaced LEDs with buttons that activated one of three buzzers, three buttons were wired with resistors, three were not. 
This project was built in response to Heidegger and his essay on the essence of technology. Heidegger mentions that humans aren’t using technology in a way that would benefit all of humanity, we are taking its potential for granted and wasting it on things that aren't necessary. With this idea I made a device with its only purpose being to burn out and stop working. After the in progress critique I decided to tweak this response a bit. I am still responding to the idea that we are wasting technologies potential, instead of a device made to fail, its a device for purely entertainment purposes. Something that is so simple but also made for the entertainment of others.


My materials were chosen based on availability but also on something I could keep clean and presentable, something that would give my work a finished feeling. I found an old first aid kit container that I decided to use as the case for all my electrical components. I wanted to keep the interface very straightforward, clean and simple. I had to stick with a similar layout in-between corrections in order to keep the all of the same holes where they were. Button colors were chosen on which connection it was making, relay or no relay. Everything was powered from a six volt batter pack.