The Work of Vuk Cosic

For Doug's FA332 Print and Web class, we have been asked to do a presentation on an artist from one of our textbooks. For my presentation, I presented (or in the near future will present) a man named Vuk Cosic. I figured another new media artist would make a good blog post, right? Right.
Vuk Cosic was born on July 31st, 1966 in Yugoslavia. He graduated from the University of Belgrade with a BA in Archaeology. I find this very interesting, especially considering I couldn't find any other educational information, such as some sort of artistic degree. Apparently archaeologists like to make art with computer programs these days.
Cosic is most well known for his work with 3D ASCII art. For those who don't know, ASCII art (which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the positioning and manipulation of text to be put into an artistic form, such as a picture. Cosic, however, takes this a step farther and makes an actual 3D image that moves for about 5 to 10 seconds, and then repeats itself. He has remade some famous movie scenes, such as a scene from Hitchcock's "Psycho," a scene from "Star Trek," and even a scene from a pornographic film titled "Deep Throats." Here are a few examples of his ASCII art:

Along with ASCII art, another one of Cosic's famous works is known as "History of Art for Airports." In this work, Cosic takes different works of art (both famous and non) and simplifiers them down to the style of a bathroom pictogram. I find these to be the most interesting kind of work the Cosic does. Here are a few examples:

Cezanne's "Card Players" and Cosic's simplified version

Warhol's "Cambell's Soup" and Cosic's simplified version

Vuk Cosic's web page.

Abstraction Text Art

Here is my submission for our abstract vector text art...thing. Originally, the text was in the font Brauhaus 93 and said "1 28 93," which is my date of birth. I chose this because of two reasons: 1. Because it is my birth day and therefore meaningful to me, and 2. because I had no idea what word I would want to use for this project, and thought using numbers would have more effect (which I believe they did). I used strokes, colors, and a lot of random clicking and dragging to get to what is now the final product. Enjoy

:

"1/28/93"

Playstation 4 Specs Announced

Last night, Sony announced the upcoming Playstation 4 and some of the new specs about it. They hosted a live stream of the announcement online last night at 6pm EST.
Some of the new details about this new system are awesome to me, some of them not so much, and some of them are just weird.
Sony's Playstation 4 will boast several new hardware specs, such as 8GB of memory, an AMD Radeon graphics processor, and an 8-core AMD "Jaguar" x86-84 to power the machine. I'm not exactly an expert on hardware, but these all sound like some purty fancy stuff!
Along with hardware, Sony announced a new way to play games with friends. This is what I found to be so strange. Apparently with the new Playstation 4, you will be able to virtually "hand" off the controller to a friend, from any distance. You have the ability to allow friends to pick up and play a game you are playing from across the world. This seems very strange to me, but who knows? It could be the next big thing in gaming.
Other new things announced included the new DualShock controller and the PS4 Eye. The controller looks similar to its ancestors, but has several new toys built in including a touch-sensitive sensor and a "share" button that allows you to post things such as game plays or screenshots from the Playstation to the internet with the click of a button. The PS4 Eye is similar to the Xbox 360's Kinect system, but with more FPS and 1280x800 pixel sensor (Kinect only has 640x480 and 30 FPS). Here are a few pictures as well as a link to an IGN article about the PS4's announcement:

The new "DualShock 4" controller for the PS4

The PS4 "Eye"

IGN's article about the PS4 here.

Evan Eckard

Today I did my presentation on my artist, Evan Eckard. Evan works as the Creative Director for a company known as Adchemy.com. He started out his career taking pictures for a county fire department in central California, but moved to northern California for his current job. He has worked in the graphic design industry for over 15 years, both for Adchemy.com and for his own personal business. He has two main websites that he uses to show and sell his work. His more professional work goes to his main website, evaneckard.com. For his work that is more personal or less formal, he posts them to his YouTube channel, youtube.com/user/evaneckard. He uses many different programs to achieve his work, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Wacom tablets. Here are a few examples of his work (click the image title to see the video of it being made):

"Zombies"

"Assassin's Creed 3 Emblem"

"Lion (Syndicate Logo Reimagined)"

"Rusty the Robot"

www.evaneckard.com
Evan Eckard's YouTube channel

Montage Project

This is my picture for our montage project. Mostly just posting it so I can show it in class.

I call it... "Messy Room"

Water-Resistant Fabrics

First of all, watch this:

Now THIS is cool! Scientists have been able to use nanotechnology to create liquid-resistant surfaces, both hard and soft. This is incredible to me. I see this as a huge step toward the future of technology, particularly nanotechnology. This one itself has many practical uses, such as a water-resistant windshield or water-resistant work gloves. I look forward to seeing future variations and uses of this awesome technology.

The Importance of Context

On page 166 of our textbook, Stewart discusses context. She talks about how different works of art viewed in one context or another can drastically alter how the viewer perceives them. She gives the example of Winston Churchill giving the "V for Victory" sign in a picture. This hand gesture (generally) does not mean "V for Victory" anymore, but rather is a symbol for peace or, more simply, a way to represent the number two.
The importance of context is something that has always been smashed into my brain by my dad ever since I was little. He always wanted me to know how important it was. However, I never really thought about how important it is in art. Art is something that can have an infinite amount of meanings, depending on who the viewer is. By adding context to a picture, you can lessen those meanings and get closer to the artist's intended meaning of the picture.
Here are some examples from Google:

When Googling "V for Victory"

When Googling "Peace"

When Googling "Two"

To someone who did not know what this symbol meant, or if they only knew one of the meanings, any picture they saw of this gesture would only mean one thing to them. But with context, you get a deeper as well as more accurate meaning to the picture. Context is important!

$50 Ears for Your Android

Unfortunately, I have found another stupid invention to share. I was hoping to find one I like, but this is one I just had to share. Let's start with this: I really like video games. I like console games, hand held games, PC games, all of it. However, this is just ridiculous. I found an article today about a USB-connected controller that you stick onto your Android phone to make playing video games easier. Why would anyone do this? I know from experience that pretty much any "real" game (as in not just a simple app) on a phone is usually pretty lame. Adding a "controller" doesn't help take away its lameness, it just makes your phone look stupid as you play. I mean just look at this thing:

It looks like your phone has some creepy goblin ears or something. And what is it going to help you with? Shooting your Angry Birds a little more accurately? Probably not. It will most likely be the one of those things you buy, use once, and then put on a shelf for the rest of forever. 

This "XOPAD" goes for about $50. If you want my advice, save up a little more and buy something like a DS for around $100, play some real games, and save your phone the embarrassment of giant, fake ears.

Link to the story here.

Asymmetrical Balance vs. The Rule of Thirds

As I was looking through our book, I came across a section titled "Asymmetrical Balance" (page 79). This section talks about how it is important to keep balance in a picture by having different sized objects or points of interest on either side of the photo you are taking. This all makes sense, but then I thought of something we learned in Doug's class (FA 332): the rule of thirds. This rule basically is a guideline for keeping objects out of the middle of a picture and keeping them closer to one of the corners of the picture, shown by this diagram:

My main question is how do the these two work together? Would it be better to have your focal object alone in a picture or have something on the other end to give it balance? Here are some more examples:

This picture obeys the rule of thirds, but not asymmetrical balance.

This one, however, has asymmetrical balance and has the rule of thirds, somewhat. I feel as if the pawns on the right kind of ruin the rule of thirds seeing as some of them are basically in the middle of the picture.

So, should you always follow the rule of thirds? Or should you always follow asymmetrical balance? Or should you try and always use both in a picture? I have no idea. This whole photography thing is still pretty new to me!