My journeys into converting text and ideas to multimedia and other types of art.
http://doublehappiness.ilikenicethings.com
I am totally going to rip off their ideas. I am just stating this here, for anyone who cares to read this.
Scroll to the bottom of this awesome visual and audio blog to their former posts and enjoy. I also have this particular link’s Alvin and the Chipmunk’s rendition of Godsmack’s Voodoo song running round and round in my head like that terrible game you play where you try to make someone have a hideously awful song running around and around in their head all day. Like when you sneak up behind someone you love and sing the lyrics to Neverending Story or Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore or other such dreck.
So, I am going to riff on my Disco Hillbilly work by ripping off what they are creating at this site. It’s totally worth it…. and now I am back to trolling this site again and again… just so you don’t miss it:
As the daughter of someone that was once at-large president of the Graphic Artists Guild of America, it’s time I grabbed this graphics stuff by its horns. Vocab for today, straight out of the comics: z-buffering, painter’s algorithm, alpha channel, and my favorite of today, alpha compositing. All of this has to do with how computer graphics are realized. Painter’s algorithm is the depth of 3D on 2D that painters employ, that is, the background is obscured by objects in the foreground. As for jiving on things, this simple graph is what I am trippin’ on right now:
Alpha Compositing
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_channel
Take a look, how pixels are related and how math gets them there. It’s all good sense, really. I am sure the creators A.R. Smith and then Thomas Porter and Tom Duff who worked on this back in the 70s are happy to have my approval. Now I see a use for algebra, because, algebra is what makes this work in a digital world. In the back of my mind, I know this, but the front of my mind thinks, if we’d been shown real-life applications of this in eighth grade, and, been given the chance to maybe work in the real world with algebra creating graphics, I might be a mathematician today. Look at all the cool things using alpha blending:
No, I don’t really need to know about alpha compositing in order to start gaining on these graphics programs, but this is sure cool anyway. There are things in my life that I set out to relearn, or to learn, because I felt I wasn’t educated enough in them the first time around. Math and science are a couple of those things. I went all the way to Calculus in high school, but math was taught completely out of the context of the physical world, and we never applied any of the math we learned. Seeing the math applied is quite exciting. I wonder how many artists feel locked out of math; so many I have known do… What would happen if science and math and art schools were to blend? Or maybe just one school were to blend, creating a degree in applied mathematics and art, or a BSBFA?
The hero’s journey includes crossing water, usually a large body of water, till he gets closer to the center of the action and himself. The changing point in this journey is when the hero seems to be as far away as possible, both physically and mentally, from that which he seeks or needs to obtain. Then the ground shifts and actions propel him fully…maybe not in the direction he seeks, but anyway, all is moving finally along (finally). That is my restart with this blog. I was in Tbilisi, Georgia till October 2009. I crossed water. Now I am near the Kanawha River. You can go home again. Been thinking about New York City, too. I have often said that I grew up in West Virginia, but became an adult in New York. I have looked at the Appalachian ghosts square on. Not sure I have looked yet, fully, at the ones floating for me still in the Big Apple. They will have to wait a while longer.
The folks I have been reading lately blend together: Lilian Gish stating a well-worn notion that “Art” (her capitalization, not mine) is for the few. This is melding with a wonderful essay, The Mask and the Movietone (1929), by the writer H.D. in which she worries that films are like our dolls come to life and she frets about what will happen to our imaginations once our “dolls” become too perfect.
My husband gave me a couple of books by Twyla Tharp for Christmas. I am not much of one for writing assignments. In fact, I generally hate writing exercises. I don’t mind writing nonfictional analysis on demand, but I never want to write creativly what someone else tells me to write. Collaboration is fine; that I like, but I don’t want to “Imagine you are in a field and only one person from your life can walk toward you. Write that scene.” I got enough on my emotional writing plate, thanks.
I find a good chunk of Tharp’s thinking about creativity very competitive and quite black and white (I stand by Merle Haggard’s notion that creative people shouldn’t compete, and, I also often think of more traditional societies in which everyone dances, everyone sings, everyone imbues art in their daily objects–where that life force is just part of everyone’s life, and I think, what good is Western reach for the new, Western reach for the novel, Western reach for “perfection” and “be all can you be?” Who the hell am I, really, to judge? I can like or not like something, but that in no way makes me, or you, right… and who cares? I am still opinionated, but those opinions, really, doesn’t friggin’ matter….).
In any case, Tharp is not screwing around, though, when it comes to one list of questions she calls “Your Creative Autobiography.” It’s in a chapter in which she discusses “creative DNA”–basically, what is your imprint, what is important to you, and what mark do you leave, what framework do you work from?
I am going to work on these questions. They feel like the right place to start. Then, I am going to work on them in the programs I am beginning to learn, then I am going to post some kind of results here.
One last note, I don’t know whether it was Tharp, but something I was reading the last few days also spoke about the tug between being alone and being in company that creative folks have… the strange impulse for creation, which often takes solitude (even when creating with others, it may take a way of being undisturbed, at the very least) and then an impulse to share with an audience, and, how the latter can always be disconcerting. I know for me that when I share my work publicly, as publicly as I have in the last year and a half, when I first release what I do, I feel like I have been caught with my pants down. I feel that way until some unsolicited post-publication feedback comes in, and then, my face doesn’t burn, or, burn as bright. My sense is that many more people feel that way. I wonder.
I professed half a year ago to be making this dive. Life caught up with me in the meantime. So, finally, today, I am catching up with it (that is, Life). So what if that Julie person cooked all of Julia Child’s recipes from one book in one year? I am giving myself six months (half the time) to get myself up to a new speed and to truly take control of what is important in life: the web. Six years ago I learned basic html and was making what seemed like snazzy websites for then, that is, back in the day. I was also soundforging my way along the audio highway while producing an online arts radio show…. and doing this all open source. Then I fell down a hole–went overseas and all, wrote a novel, launched a nonprofit, and now, well, here I am now, back.
The art I long to create lives in flash and in multimedia… It’s unsightly as I drool all over myself over what other people can create and post online. I just invested in some open source hankies to mop up.
Okay, so what did I download today? They sound like they come straight out of a geek dictionary:
The next thing I will add to this is mastering Flash animation and really grabbing control of WordPress rather than it grabbing control of me.
Okay, open source, listen here, Nvu, you Gimpshop, and Inkscape, back up because you will be mine!
So, there are those things you see you wish you’d done. I can’t stop watching the flash animation poetry jazz — I call what they are doing “flashbop”: http://www.yhchang.com/
This would be a dream project: multilingual, elegant, intelligent, simple in its concept, complex in its execution. This is how I want to read poetry. I want flash and the web to feel like a real person talking. I want to be able to push into the personality — to pulse with the webpage. The only thing that could possible make this site cooler would be making it interactive somehow.
The next thing I have been obsessed with. I wrote recently in Disco Hillbilly, i.e. I web-published an older short piece on mine about whether there are any real male divas. This is also something I wish I would have created. I couldn’t stop watching it earlier this year — the blend of nonsense, dance, exuberance gets me every time. The concept is that this is a song mimicking what English sounds like to foreigners. Celetano is a diva:
Okay, musicians are often large innovators. It comes with the territory of change or die. Regardless of what you think of his music, this is truly a beautiful website, and, most likely where websites are headed. Check out:
Someone informed me this website was maybe also built using After Effects and most definitely flash. Notice how clean the designs are. The pictures are also interesting, engaging, clear. There is also almost no text on this website. I was also told that the way the movement in this website works is along a line…. as if the images were being pulled on a pulley. There is also a smart mix of photo galleries, video, music (though that rift does drive me away after a while. If it were varied up, I’d literally stay on this website forever).
This website makes almost any other website look like it’s from the Stone Age….
We all know people don’t visit regular websites much any more. Folks are either on social media, reading articles, playing games, or buying stuff. This is a website I never tire of.
One note on my last post on Youth Bank from Ireland: it was pointed out to me that someone felt he should be able to click on the corners of the scrolls to turn the page. Good point and that would be even cooler design.