Jess’s Emergent Aesthetics Project

My Micro images

This is an interior microscopic view of a lung

This is part of a fingernail

Microscopic art

Searching through microscopic images for inspiration I found the term microscopic art, taking science and creating a pretty composition out of it. Here a few examples of what I’ve found.

Scaly hairs of Elaeagnus illuminated with polarised light.

Vascular Bundles of Zea (corn)

Bone Tissue

30 second

My 30 second visual representation which is a brief showing of the type of visual that will be used, click on link to see

second movie

Project Proposal

With this project I will use the idea of mitigating adversaries with using the theme of sublime. The sublime element will be created by taking a series or horrible and disgusting images and finding the beauty that is in it. This will be achieved by showing the subject in a different perspective that how it is normally viewed. By viewing a subject from a microscopic view or seeing a pattern that is animated, what may have repulsive sight originally has a completely different effect and can be quite beautiful.

These perspectives of disgusting subjects will be presented through the use of a mixture of photography, film and 3D animation. Primary I have started looking at different aspects of the human body, how blood cells can peacefully float compared to seeing blood running down a hairy scraped knee, or as another aspect of seeing the strand of damaged hair from a microscopic lenses and the revolting flaking ridge’s that it has compared to seeing it among a million other strands of hair. Seeing the unique patterns and textures that skin has when it is magnified twenty times over is different to what we are able to see through the naked eye, it can been seen as either beautiful or disgusting depending on what the viewer thinks.

The imagery will be collaborated and displayed through an interactive website created using Macromedia Flash. The idea is to get the user to be able to have some control over what they are seeing by having the layout of navigation clearly shown. But by clicking in particular areas the user will set in to a specific direction so that the user will fully experience the sense of journey and sublime that is trying to be portrayed. 

Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

I read as a bit of research Douglas Davis’s evolving thesis on art in the digital world. This thesis was written between 1991 to 1995, the early days of the internet but it mostly looks at how art, images, sounds and words are received and demonstrated virtually. It mostly looks at how the aura of art is lost when it’s digital which i think is wrong if art was built in the context of being digital then no aura is lost but when it’s been painted and then scanned i’ll agree with Douglas. It doesn’t really have anything do with being sublime but still an interesting read in our art is received in digital form. 

Sublime

Precedent Word is Sublime - Taking an ugly situation and creating something beautiful out of it.

Precedent work - Joseph Mallord William Turner was influenced through the industrial evolution, he took ugly situations and transformed them into something that was beautiful and quite poetic. He didn’t just capture reality but he capture his personal experience of the situation. He was the first artist in the history of art to truely capture speed and movement in his work Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railways - 1844. His work is the definition of sublime.

Precedent Digital Artist - Jonathan Harris. He is like the modern day equivalent to Turner with his photographic storytelling making the viewer become interactive and being able to control the story.

Proposal

My project proposal is to take an a image that is beautiful and zoom out to reveal the real image and to receive the whole information which can be something quite disgusting. I want to take my viewer/interacter through a journey which they can control to a certain degree. But their every interaction has consequences and can lead them down a new path.

Ubiq

I finished reading Ubiq and the ending is crap, I was expecting a lot more than just heres a can Ubiq you’ll be safe now from that evil half-life eater. I expected that Jory would have been taken down so that he could harm no more half-lifers.

The aspect of this story that most interests me is that this half-life world can be an exact replica of the real world, so exact that the occupants don’t even know that they are dead except for the world turning back in time but that is control. They are able to control the way that their world looks to a certain degree.

After finishing reading this book I came up with an idea of taking a photo of yourself and run it through some kind of interactive program to distort your image so that it’s almost an abstraction of what you really are, there is still apart of yourself in the image. This is would be a kind of symbolic representation to taking a current image which is your living life and converting it to this half representation of yourself. It is said that a photo is like the window into your soul and that is kind of half-life is, your body has failed but your soul is still alive.

Another Idea

Another idea that came to me this morning, which i don’t know how it will fit in or how I could achieve it but here goes. I’m not a morning person, I’m very grumpy until I get my first cup of coffee and I’m assuming that there are lots of people like me out there. Round about every morning I can manage to find something to rant about, like people on scooters doing 60k on a 80k hill and getting stuck behind them and missing my train and having to wait 30min for the next train to come.

This would be a user input kind of like the I feel fine site but with completely text being created visually appealing

Research - Games

There is this game called hold the button, which is exactly what the game is, you hold the button to see who can last the longest.

So if I take that kind of idea but add a context to it such as to keep with my life and death theme hold the button to save your life, maybe make it with balance hold the button but if you hold it too long you die if you don’t hold it long enough you’ll die.

Precedent - Paradox

With this project i want to create an almost paradox, taking Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment as a precedent but not the brutality or the actual death of something living but just the theory. I want to show consequence through design interactive, through interaction it (not sure what “it” is just yet) will live but with to much interaction it would die. No matter what you do you can not win you’ll always lose