New addition to my arsenal, and very likely to become my main camera.

The first half of my senior year here at the University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design is done and over. With half the year gone, half of the time I have to work on my IP project is gone as well. Three months of conceptualizing, discussion, and testing over, with just under three months left to finish more conceptualizing, more testing, and all my actual production work.

So, Where Am I At?

The concept I started with some months ago was to do general infographic work using a variety of data sets as the information I was to transform, then make some sort of fine art print of the resulting illustration using a medium such as woodblock, screen print, or what have you. Now, my concept has transformed from visualizing data in general, to visualizing a more specific sort of data, music. More specifically my concept is that I am exploring the connection between music itself, and static and moving visualizations of music. I had originally wanted to not visualize just music because I thought I might be pigeonholing myself into only showing in the end, to my eventual viewers, that I’m only able to visualize one type of data source. I thought it would be a better portfolio project if I showed how I can effectively visualize all sorts of data and show how flexible I am in the work I can do as an potential employee.

At this point I have three illustrations done on the digital side of things, three videos done, one complete set of woodblocks cut, one quarter of the blocks are cut for the second illustration, the silk screens for the third are ready and waiting to be covered in emulsion and exposed. The ideas for the fourth and fifth illustrations and pseudocode for the programs is in my mind ready executed.

What Went Right?

I am super glad I decided to visualize just music. It’s super fun; I like working the programming, I like turning music I like into illustrations, and as much as I like working on the computer, I love doing the hands on, fine art side of things. It’s even been suggested by one of my GSI’s that I could pigeonhole myself more, perhaps by doing something like sticking to one particular musical genre. Honestly, there’s too much music out there that I want to work on to just limit myself to one genre.

What Went Wrong?

Time management, plain and simple. Personally, compared to the rest of my class I’ve been doing pretty well with keeping up with my projected timeline. Sometimes though I’d get stuck on one problem and just spend hours more time on it than I should have and it all adds up, little by little. Combine my programmers-block with the time it takes to cut actual woodblocks by hand, and the time it takes to learn how to work RhinoCAM and all the in’s and out’s of the Roland 4-axis mill and you’ve got yourself quite a large chunk of time, not exactly wasted, but spent on the little things. In my endeavor to learn how to cut my second blocks on the Roland mill I wasted around eight square feet of MDF and something like 12 working hours making mistakes and tweaking the feeds/speeds and bit sizes, but I eventually got it right.

Another thing that went wrong is that I thought a little too grandiose in the beginning of the year with regards to what I’d be able to create in what is actually such a short amount of time. I had originally wanted to create at least eight final prints and two bronze sculptures. It doesn’t sound like to much to me, but in actuality, it is a lot of work.

Endgame

I think in the end I’m going to have five or six final prints, each with a video that will play beneath the print (with headphones to listen to the music) to show the relationship between the music, the moving visual representation of the music, and the static visual representation of the music. There will also be a kiosk that will have videos of each song rendered out using all the different visualizers so the viewer can see how the visualization changes with the various different musical inputs.

I’m very excited to continue with my project this next semester.

As some of you may know, I’m working on music visualization for my senior IP project. And recently I came across this rather unique way of visualizing music. It’s a bit masochistic, but hey, it’s damn interesting at the same time.

You Know I Love You from Alex Jacque on Vimeo.

Something I’m working on, an early version. Made in Processing.

Senior year for the University of Michigan Art & Design students means one hell of a long project. A year-long (really only 7-8 months) project that is supposed to be more or less the culmination of the 4 years students spend at the university. Myself, this is my 5th year in college, but only my third at the University of Michigan. The current curriculum is that of a very conceptual nature; “thinking outside the box” type stuff. This can be beneficial, but all the conceptual stuff comes at the expense of very little technical, skill focused classes. Unfortunate, but a reality. Those that care make do and learn what they need to know outside of class.

The year-long project I mentioned above is for our IP class, that’s Integrative Project for the unknowing. My initial ideas for my project were based off my main interests: continue developing my analog photoblog, do some infographics work, do something using code, furniture design, packaging, or something with computer generated designs.

I’ve spent my time here working in all variety of mediums; wood, plastic, ink, paint, steel, bronze, pixels, code, etcetera, etcetera, and now my final year is in it’s beginning stages. I was pretty set on continuing with my photoblog before the year began, but once things got underway I started to think about all the things I won’t have access to after graduation, mainly the printmaking studio and the sculpture/metals studio. I had to make a decision. I could either do something that I can do anytime or something that I have limited access to; easy choice.

With that said, my project can basically be summed up as a combination of new media processes and traditional, fine art finishings. What I’m envisioning as my final project is a series of prints, and a few bronze sculptures. The prints will be data visualizations from any sort of data set, a few from music, perhaps some sort of census data or what have you. The data will be processed with code that I write, in programs like Processing or Flash, then finalized as a digital illustration which I will take to a 4-axis mill to cut into some wood blocks, and finally I’ll use those blocks to pull some woodblock prints. I might also do some intaglio printmaking and screenprinting, but we’ll see about that. The bronze sculpture will be based on waveform from some sort of audio source. I plan on making two sculptures, one utilizing a laser cutter and the other using rapid-prototyping.

The final result of the project will be taking new media art which is generally considered “throw away” art, that is to say, it isn’t exactly desired or collectable as you see with the traditional mediums in the fine arts world, and then transforming it into something desirable. Basically taking digital art and giving it more “credibility” by transforming it into “fine art.” With this project I hope to further my knowledge of programming, data visualization, and the boundary between digital art and fine art.

Now is the time to let my inner geek shine through into this world paint, pencils, pigments, and metals.

My grandfather passed away a few years back, and my grandmother almost exactly a year before him. Without saying much about their passing, I would like to write about some of the things that they left behind. I should preface this post with the fact that over the years I’ve spent at college and the last one or two of high school I developed a strong interest in film photography.

Anyway, many of the things I saved from their house were related to photography in some fashion or another. I got a few rolls of really old film, a roll of shot yet undeveloped Kodachrome, some 16mm film, an old Argoflex camera + attachable flashbulb flash, a Kodak Photo CD camera, and a pile of old slides.

The pictures, for the most part, date back to my mother’s childhood, and were taken all over the world as my grandpa traveled extensively due to his job. Slowly over the last few years I’ve been scanning these slides, doing some basic touching up, color correcting, and archiving them. I have a cartridge or two to scan still, and I really haven’t shown them to anyone yet. I want to do something with them after I finish scanning them, but I’m not sure what. Maybe something online, but maybe something printed. I don’t know.