Category Archives: Art

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The Aftermath of Study Abroad

  September 17, 2015

This summer I had the pleasure of being apart of an 18-member group of students and professors that traveled to Turkey for a study abroad trip that has really impacted my life. Our goal was to study Turkish politics and the Syrian refugee conflict. The three weeks we were there, we engulfed ourselves with learning from NGO’s, think tanks, institutions and meeting directly with Syrians that had been displaced due to the war in their country. There are many stories that I can share, but for this sake of time in this blog, I will just share 2. Story 1:  One of the biggest surprises to me was my apparent celebrity status in Turkey. I identify as African American, and much to my surprise, that automatically made me a rarity for the Turkish people. Myself and a another women on the trip that originally is from the Caribbean, found ourselves being followed and asked to take pictures with random strangers throughout the cities we visited. The areas that it happened the most were around the historical sites. We would be walking with our group, if we stopped and stepped to the outer edges of the pack, people would start snapping pictures with their cel phones or coming up to us asking if we would take a picture. For the first few times we thought they were asking us to take a picture for them, but once we agreed they would hand the phone off to a friend and jump in the picture with … Continue reading

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#nicehashtag – Building a data-driven sculpture

  March 1, 2015 , ,

Since early fall 2014 I’ve been working on a data-driven sculpture for HLN called “#nicehashtag” that is now installed in the CNN World Headquarters in here in Atlanta (if you take the Inside CNN tour you’ll see it outside Studio 7). Programmable Hue bulbs change color to reflect realtime sentiment analysis of Twitter. The algorithm accesses Twitter every few seconds and pulls the most recent tweet into its program, determines whether the tweet is positive, neutral, or negative, then compares it to previous tweets and converts it into a percentage that it stores in memory. When that percentage reaches a certain threshold, the color changes. My goal with this project was to consider how we use technology to interact with each other, and how that affects our emotional connections. Screens have enhanced and expanded our communication capabilities enormously, but there are still concerns about what it does to our ability to empathize with others. #nicehashtag is a physical representation of internet emotion, at least within the Twitterverse. The challenge with any technologically-enhanced artwork is that the novelty of the tech will overpower the concept that (hopefully) supports it. Using tech in art just because it’s there is seductive but also dangerous for the above reason.

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Making Things From Discards – Vintage Craft Book Inspires Hi-Tech Art – Part 1

  November 23, 2014 , ,

To continue from my previous post, I’ve been working on artwork that explores the relationships between craft and art as viewed through modern technological tools, specifically 3D-scanning and -Printing, and what that means in terms of gender roles and identity. I’m choosing vintage craft books and executing the “creative” projects they contain in step by step instructions, but substituting computers and digital production methods for scissors and glue. My first project comes from the book, Making Things From Discards by Hazel Pearson Williams, first published in the mid-1960s. The book was targeted toward “housewives,” and indeed the introduction page is rife with outdated attitudes toward labor and gender roles, placing an excess of leisure time as a primary obstacle to be overcome through craftwork. This got me thinking about what type of craft is socially acceptable for each gender to assume as their leisure work, both then and now. How have these attitudes changed, or have they? In the mid- to late-20th century, women, as this book illustrates, can be seen to acceptably occupy themselves with what to me seems like “soft” craft: sewing, knitting, scrapbooking, floral arranging, etc. While men are confined to “hard” craft: woodworking, metalsmithing, automotive repair, etc. Women decorate; men build. These social attitudes are built upon the notion that women are somehow less than men, inherently. For a man to perform a woman’s craft or work is seen as being “unmanly,” and confers a lesser status upon that man (again according to prevailing social mores). … Continue reading

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Tech for Artists First Project – Egg-Carton Peacock

  November 9, 2014 ,

With the goal of bringing interdisciplinary, data-driven tools to artists, my first step is to learn the tech myself and to create proof-of-concept artworks as demonstration examples, and then lead workshops for interested artist students about how they can use these tools in their own artistic practice. Project 1: Agisoft Photoscan My first tech exploration is the process of 3D photometric scanning using Agisoft Photoscan, and then 3D print a sculpture based on manipulations of that scan. I thought this would be a good transition tech for artists since it is so visual and deals with real-world applications where big-data and similar tech seem abstract and untouchable (at first). My first artwork will conceptually explore how 3D printing and scanning fit into the art/craft dialectic and how gender roles are defined. Traditionally, “craft” has been assigned primarily to the female gender, especially decorative and soft-material crafts like embroidering or floral arranging. Men have engendered hard craft, using materials like wood and metal that have practical uses. With the advent of at-home production using complex and technical 3D printers, men have traditionally dominated the genre for whatever reason. Now, in a role reversal, 3D printers on the consumer level are overwhelmingly known to create either parts for building and engineering, or decorative trinkets and gadgets. Using a craftbook from the 1970s written specifically for “housewives with leisure time,” I’ll recreate one of the projects using new technology. Specifically, I’ll 3D scan a foam egg carton, then in the computer attempt to … Continue reading