Jason King is a relatively new artist-in-training studying at ACAD, trying his best to learn a variety of techniques in the arts and design field. Interests include drawing, primarily with charcoal and pastels (mostly chalk, though he thinks oil is funny too). Fields of interest include character design, illustration, and landscapes/still lifes. Fields that Jason is interested in getting a working knowledge of include the digital art medium, more specifically Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop.
INFLUENCES
Primus, Claypool (Bucket of Bernie Brains), Beksinski, Giger. While he isn’t a huge fan of manga or western comics, he most certainly realizes that there are some great artists working in the field, examples being Masamune Shirow and Neil Gaiman. Classical interests include Albrecht Durer, Leonardo Da Vinci, and more recent contemporaries such as Salvadore Dali and Zdzislaw Beksinski.
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Various Workings From MADT101
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The Mural Project
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To start the class off, our instructor had us working in groups to create a mural based upon a predetermined quotation, in this case Jimmy Wales’ quote “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”. To that end, our group focused specifically upon the usage of the internet and computers as learning tools and as driving forces of learning and culture, represented in the various computer monitors that all feature mashups of various images related to science and culture. What I took from this project was valuable experience working with other people who had very different ideas on how to create this project, so a fair bit of compromise was in order from all group members. This mural was also rather important to me in the sense that it forced me to look at art from a non-artist’s perspective, which is to say that whatever medium an artist may work in, it has to capture the potential audience’s attention in a way that the viewer can relate to; with that in mind, the group realised that the mural was perhaps too abstract to someone looking at it from the outside, and so some text was added to each panel in order to clarify the mural’s message.
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The Audio/Video Project
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What we have here is my first attempt at making my own video, entitled “Tasty Vidiot”, and inspired by the Jimmy Wales quote “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.“. Here I use a soundfile that I recorded of my own savage breathing, altered into something both primal and ethereal, and then matched with several images of interactive technology in an attempt to show how useful and ingrained technology is in our daily lives. Tasty Vidiot may be simplistic, but I learned a great deal from the creation of this video, such as how to match up images with background sound in a way that makes sense, as well as learning more about the process of video composition.
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The GIF Workshop
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Up until this workshop, I had never actually created a GIF of my own, though I have always had a great deal of respect for GIF artists. Evolution is showing a very brief example of the process starting from a prokaryote organism up to a human. Using bare-boned line drawings in order to create enough material to make enough frames for a functional GIF resulted in me not getting in a great amount of detail, but I liked that there was still a semblance of smoothness to the animation. Rage was made with minimal time left in the class, and summed my feelings up pretty well at that point; I was kind of frustrated that I wasn’t able to work faster and create more material for both GIF projects, and that came to the forefront with the Rage GIF.
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The Programming Project
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Extasy is an I-Pad application, its purpose being to “brand” the musician Les Claypool, and to a lesser extent Oysterhead, the band that created the music in this programming piece. This project was a most interesting deviation from the norm for me, and despite a great deal of frustration in borking the code and not getting quite what I wanted my shapes and images to do, I still felt quite the sense of accomplishment when I finished with it. I’m not sure if I branded Les Claypool so much as I attempted to capture a bit of his eccentricity in my project, spiralling images in and out to the beat of Oysterhead’s “The Army’s On Extasy”, as the larger-than-life figure of Claypool himself hurtles through outer space towards the viewer.
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The Video/Audio Remix
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Drowse is a video and audio piece that was to include some form of remix, which in this case was featured via a DJ that sampled a section of a contemporary minimalist composer’s piece, with only a tempo change and the barest pitch adjustment. In the end, I found myself more interested in trying to tell a story of how art helped me to break out of a funk that I had been caught up in for years, rather than focusing so much on the remix part of the project, although I did remix/play around with parts of the composer’s piece as well. Though it did deviate somewhat from the initial goal of focusing on remix, I still enjoyed working on this video, and took the opportunity to draw on my experience with “Tasty Vidiot in order to come up with a more complex effort.