Vintage postcard Remix fun – Greetings From New York…
Been working on an example for one of the first assignments of the semester. Its not required that students have to “remix” existing content to achieve their final outcome, but it sure is a lot of fun, and sets a great tone for a written narrative.) Which is a part of the assignment).
Skills practiced and applied: Composition, organization of elements, figure/ground, pen tool basics, cutting, pasting, measuring & mounting.
PS – this is not computer dependent, a series of color photocopies, an x-acto knife, bristol paper and rubber cement will also do the trick.
“We need a caption, Phil, I don’t want to disappoint Roz again, help me out here”Countless memories, the sea air and the seemingly creative blunders of reflective such-ness..what will you contribute to the process?This is a manipulated image, its a silly one, or perhaps you resonate with it seriously? Either way, we need to adjust the contrast of the art work, please help by listing some of the options we can apply.This is great fodder for creative inducement, consider the potential of how images speak to us, especially finding value in the subjective. What will you “allow” yourself to share?Contrasts can be oh so subtle, they can disrupt the default patterns, this is a metaphor! How will you disrupt the pattern to bypass the part of you that clings to the familiar?OK, patterns can also be very COOL! Patterns are about order, but order is in need of an integration of variety every so often, OK, this is another metaphor, see the pattern? 🙂A little bit of movement goes a long long way! A little bit of texture goes a long way as well. Seems to me that creative variety is more accessible than we may think..Ahem, you get the message, right?
“The Contemplation of Metaphoric Flight”, 2019, is a series of digital art illustrations & GIF animations generated from public domain source images via the NYPL digital archives. The illustrations were created by your old friend, Ryan Seslow. The new series of works above were specifically created to be displayed here on the C.A.C as a part of the Net Art website’s ongoing exhibition series. It is intended to serve as a visual example, an accessible template, and the creative potential for displaying, publishing, presenting and archiving such a project. (The whole thing is a metaphor)
Wait! Am I suggesting that an online exhibition, published as a blog post on a unique cross-campus social media network can also be used as a teaching tool? A transparent pedagogical tactic?! Well, yes, yes, I am! Lets dig in.
The original public domain images were cut-out with the pen-tool, composed and applied using adobe photoshop (photoshop is your friend and loves you). Do you need a photoshop pen-tool / cut-out video tutorial? Go Here – The cut-outs were necessary for the first iteration of the static pictures above. (Im referring to the bird portraits and the human clothes used to place their heads onto and into) The cut-outs are handy as they can be saved as both .psd files (the original photoshop documents) and as a transparent .PNG file. The .PNG files have a transparent background, this makes it easy to layer them over and into existing images. Plus they are forever re-usable (variation, variation, variation). But, Ryan, I don’t have access to Photoshop… OK, well, there is a trail versions! Sign up and try it! But after that trail ends, so that you know, photoshop is not required to do any of this. Web applications like Pixlr are free and accessible for all to use in the browser window itself, er, with access to the Internet of course.. OK, you can just download the .PNG files here in ready to use mode (your welcome).
Click here to access my database, this includes all spiritual GIF making insights and alchemy tactics to engage students!
OK, so, there are a few animations above as well. The first animations above were created in adobe after effects. The renders were pushed to my iPhone and into mobile applications like Glitche (yikes, its only for iOS) and iPhone’s “Clips” video sequence maker (there are alternatives for android) The files can be saved as mp4 or .mov files making it easy to apply the videos into other mobile video editing apps. Filters are fun to play with for more customizing and visual effects. The videos can be looped into GIF animations using great apps like ImgPlay (this app is awesome, it re-sizes, edits, and has multiple out-put sources.) Animated GIFs are great extenders of so many forms of communication! Im hooked on making GIFS! I make them all public domain by adding them to Giphy.com so by all means use them at will! Here is my feed.
Of course, the digital art, illustration, collage, GIF animation aspect can be a great creative course project in and of itself! Indeed, both on an individual level but perhaps collaborating is where the extended creativity and learning takes place. This can be achieved through digital storytelling using a blogging platform just like this one. See that, you find yourself “inside the actual example”! The illustrations above clearly required a caption, captions and or a narrative. Is the narrative fictional? Will you write a short story to support the images or maybe a reflection induced by the sequences of images? What references come to mind or coincide? How can you make the description compelling? Will you share hyperlinks to your references and resources? Will you embed animated GIFs or other snippets of relevant content? Can you recompose this blog post and use it as a metaphoric template for your own class project, assignment, syllabus or exhibition? (Hint, you can easily break free of the digital art example, but it might be fun to play with this as an idea.)
I believe that this example / template series will expand, who wants to collaborate on a creative cross campus project?
Welcome to the CT101 Digital Storytelling Gallery of Vapor Wave Aesthetic.
CT101 is a Digital Storytelling course at CUNY York College.
Inspired by this blog post previously published by professor Michael Branson Smith we set off to explore and experiment the genre as a class. The intention was to run through a series of class tutorials and then go off independently to generate images. Vapor Wave is a vast and unique community! The musical aspect is huge, and the accompanying visuals are so attractive and contagious. The possibilities of how and where the aesthetic can be applied is even more expansive than we thought! You might ask yourself, why haven’t I heard of this before? Good question! It all seems to start with getting your feet wet with these two videos below, a little history really helps.
The image gallery above is an energetic series of our first static outcomes! These pieces above set a tone for what is possible, and how we can push ourselves further. CT101 students are new to many of the software applications used in the course. We learned and applied a ton of new skills with adobe photoshop to create the digital collage works. Importing files, creating graphic assets, working with layers and gradients are all a part of the process. Saving files and exporting various file formats for the web were also explored and tested.
I want to make some Vapor Wave Art too! (right?)
A great way to get started is by doing your own research and finding a tutorial that you can follow along with. I suggest these two below:
The tutorials are great to work along with. But alas! What if you don’t have access to adobe photoshop? Is there an alternative? Indeed, you can use web browser applications like:
If you are looking for pre-made vapor wave elements, content and graphic assets you can easily grab a series of transparent images from doing a quick search that simply reads: “transparent vapor wave graphics“. The vapor wave community is proactive in sharing and uploading transparent graphics making it accessible and immediate for anyone to get involved.
Like what you see? Jump in and submit your work to the Vapor Wave gallery!
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