Photoshop Session 1

I've never been that confident when it comes to Photoshop. With the work below i was mainly just testing out different techniques and getting my head around it: 

Here i began by selecting a section of the models face to make it part of the dolls face. It first began too big and then i used a free transform option which allowed me to transform the selected part from big to small. (command shift T)

Below is the same concept but with the lips: 

Here is the final result, it isn't too successful but it helped me to get a grip of the different tools of Photoshop:

Here i decided to try something different and create a 'tow-faced' type effect. I found this quite hard due to the fact that the two subjects are facing in different directions. It was still good to experiment and see what would happen when i did it: 

 I didn't really feel this was succesful so i abandoned it and decided to try something else...

Below i just wanted to experiment with different contrasts, almost like a patchwork of skin tones to see what effect it would create:

The final images: 

Through the different types of experimentation i feel like i have gotten more of a grasp on the different tools of Photoshop.

Eutopia...

Eu·to·pi·a

 

noun Obsolete .

A place in which human society, natural conditions, etc., are so ideally perfect that there is complete contentment.

When i think of a Utopia i think of nice green fields with everyone living together in harmony. When it comes to a technological view of this they are set in the future, when it is believed that advanced science and technology will allow utopian living standards; for example, the absence of death and suffering; changes in human nature and the human condition. Technology has affected the way humans have lived to such an extent that normal functions, like sleep, eating or even reproduction, have been replaced by artificial means. 

If we look upon technological advancements in this way, i would say that through the digital revolution and the search for perfection, the human race is looking to science to create a world of ease and sustainable, with very little effort being needed. An easy world where we can do and have what we want at the click of a button. Not having to rely on people could create a Utopia but separate Utopias for everyone. Such as a virtual Utopia where the world is who that individual wants it to be, whether the perfect partner, house, job or car, all virtually there and yours for the taking.

Affect Theory

Through looking at Robots and Cyborgs, I wanted to try and get my head around how people become close to these robots simply by the human characteristics they portray through facial expressions. In psychology, affect is an emotion or subjectively experienced feeling. Affect theory is a branch of psychoanalysis that attempts to organize affects into discrete categories and connect each one with its typical response. So, for example, the affect of joy is observed through the reaction of smiling. These affects can be identified through immediate facial reactions that people have to a stimulus, typically well before they could process any real response to the stimulus.


If a person acknowledges that a robot is showing emotion simply by its facial expression, the person will instinctively see this Robot as more 'human-like' simply by its expressions and its capability to express emotions.


The word affect, as used in Silvian Tomkins theory, specifically refers to the "biological portion of emotion," that is, to "hard-wired, preprogrammed, genetically transmitted mechanisms that exist in each of us" which, when triggered, precipitates a "known pattern of biological events," although it is also acknowledged that, in adults, the effective experience is a result of both the innate mechanism and a "complex matrix of nested and interacting ideo-effective formations."

The nine affects

These are the nine affects, listed with a low/high intensity label for each affect and accompanied by its biological expression:

Positive:

• Enjoyment/Joy - smiling, lips wide and out
• Interest/Excitement - eyebrows down, eyes tracking, eyes looking, closer listening

Neutral:

• Surprise/Startle - eyebrows up, eyes blinking

Negative:

• Anger/Rage - frowning, a clenched jaw, a red face
• Disgust - the lower lip raised and protruded, head forward and down
• Dissmell (reaction to bad smell) - upper lip raised, head pulled back
• Distress/Anguish - crying, rhythmic sobbing, arched eyebrows, mouth lowered
• Fear/Terror - a frozen stare, a pale face, coldness, sweat, erect hair
• Shame/Humiliation - eyes lowered, the head down and averted, blushing

Frtiz Kahn

                                                  
The posters and illustrations that Kahn commissioned in the 1930s were meant to explain the complex workings of the body in intuitively understandable diagrams. For Kahn, the obvious analogies for bodily processes were the latest electronic and mechanical systems, which, in his images, tend to rely on miniature human workers, or more bizarre concepts. 


                 
        
         

To me this work suggests the body as a commodity, much like a car that has to work efficiently and be sufficient. With all the components working together in harmony to create a well old machine of superb efficiently.

These collages remind me of a much more updated version of this kind of concept -  the film Robocop:
                             
                                         
                              
With this film a terminally wounded cop returns to the force as a powerful cyborg with submerged memories haunting him. Its the idea of becoming better, more stronger and faster, more than a human but still keeping your human traits...and the conflict between the two, to be efficient and yet still remain a person.


Again another similar film to this is Terminator:
                              
The cyborg who once tried to kill Sarah Connor must now protect her teenage son, John Connor, from an even more powerful and advanced Terminator.


What i find interesting is that the Terminator who was once made to kill, is now trying to protect, and through human interaction has grown emotion and attachment to those he is protecting.

                               
         

Hannah Höch

                     

A year earlier she had met and started a relationship with Dadaist activist Rauol Hausmann and it was her time in this fiery, tempestuous affair that she developed her photomontage style. Despite the Dadaist statement of revolutionary progress and their nods towards feminist liberation, it was with great reluctance that Hoch was accepted into the group. Hans Richter describing her as a hostess, “the girl who procured sandwiches, beer and coffee, on a limited budget”.

och’s style meanwhile continued to evolve; with disjointed, decapitated and juxtaposed images created from magazine cuttings. She became master of these disturbing and compelling montages. Her piece “Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919-20)” was included in the 1^st International Dada Fair. She clearly expresses her distrust and suspicion of Weimar Germany in this and pieces like “Dada Panorama” (1919).

A complex and creative person whose effects and processes are still felt in the art rooms of today. She was so much more than, as an obituary described her on her death in 1978 as “the blonde bobbed, androgynous muse of the bad boys Dada club of 1919”.

http://knell63.hubpages.com/hub/Lady-Dada-Hannah-Hoch-Female-Dadaist-Artist

    

Webcam Stalker

When researching technology and its advances, i came across a short film entitled 'Webcam'.


"Webcam" is based on actual events and was shot entirely on a computer's webcam. The filmmakers hope that it will make people think more about the technology that we use every day and the effects that it can have on all of us. 


What stood out to me with this was how vulnerable we can be when technology has envoled to such a level.
With this short film Its almost as if its the 'lazy' way of stalking and you can be accessible to anyone without your knowledge, because of this I found it quite scary and thought it best to add to me blog:


                                      Webcam

                                       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i841CamEX3o


Furthermore i have found out that certain websites can hack your webcam and microphone without your consent: 

                                    HOW TO: Spy on the Webcams of Your Website Visitors

                                                 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-LbvglVj8Ho

Peter Kennard

                                                 

Peter Kennard has spent most of his life in London, and has been considerably more involved than most in the capital's political gatherings during the last 25 years.

As a young artist he was a painter, much influenced by the "intense and merciless" etchings of Goya. Dissatisfied with painting's lack of immediacy, he took up photomontage for its ability to show the "unrevealed truth" behind the image.

His two major subjects quickly emerged: armaments and poverty. This was the early eighties with 3 million unemployed, Thatcher in her first term girding her loins for the Falklands War, and the CND at the height of its popularity. Kennard had an audience.

For the next few years his images were everywhere. A series of touring exhibitions took his work into the galleries, but it was on the streets of Britain and Europe where they had maximum impact.

"The point of my work is to use easily accessible iconic images, but to render them unacceptable. To break down the image of the all-powerful missile....after breaking them, to show new possibilities emerging in the cracks and splintered fragments of the old reality."

His belief at this time was that photomontage had the power to show the causes rather than the results. In recent times however, he seems to have had his doubts: "There is a problem with montage in that you see it everywhere now because of digital technology. There is so much transformed imagery around that people accept constructed images without questioning their meaning. I think my work was losing impact because of that."

                                  
            

Orlan

        

In 1978, French artist Orlan was preparing to speak at a symposium on video and performance art when she had to be taken to hospital for emergency surgery. "I almost died because I had an ectopic pregnancy," she recalls as we sit in her studio in Paris. "They had to operate to save my life and remove what they told me was a non-viable foetus."

Orlan took a video crew along to film the operation and insisted she remain conscious throughout. "I wasn't in pain and what was happening to my body was of profound interest to me," she explains. "Pain is an anachronism. I have great confidence in morphine."

What she saw and filmed that day, 31 years ago, inspired her career. Orlan saw the surgeon as a priest-like figure, his assistants gathered around him like fellow celebrants at a Catholic mass. The light from above recalled the heavenly beams that shine down in Bernini's baroque sculpture of Saint Teresa, writhing in religious ecstasy. "For many years, I had appropriated baroque imagery in my work, especially in relation to Catholic art. So when I lay on the operating table, the parallels between the operating theatre and the Catholic mass were not wasted on me."

It was at 15 that she stopped being Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte from Saint-Étienne and was reborn as Orlan, a name freighted with symbolic import. Her subsequent career has been a series of rebirths and triumphs of will over technology. In 1964, she presented a nude photograph of herself, shot from above, giving birth to an androgynous mannequin, entitled Orlan S'Accouche d'Elle M'Aime (a punning French title perhaps best translated as Orlan Gives Birth to Her Beloved Self). She later reinvented herself as a saint, calling her series of performance-surgeries The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan.

                         

From 1990 to 1995, she underwent nine plastic surgery operations, intending to rewrite western art on her own body. One operation altered her mouth to imitate that of François Boucher's Europa, another changed her forehead to mimic the protruding brow of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, while yet another altered her chin to look like that of Botticelli's Venus.

Was she trying make herself more beautiful? "No, my goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It's all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself, but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. I was the first artist to do it," she says, proudly.

                    

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jul/01/orlan-performance-artist-carnal-art

Stelarc

 
This australian artist is interested in the evolutionary


architecture of the body and possible ways of redesigning 


the human augmented by implants and exoskeletons. 


Stelarc is an Australian artist who has used prosthetics, robotics, VR systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body. He is interested in the evolutionary architecture of the body and possible ways of redesigning the human augmented by implants and exoskeletons. 


His earlier work includes making 3 films of the inside of his body, amplifying body signals (such as brainwaves, muscles, bloodflow, heartbeat) and 25 body suspensions with hooks into the skin. Some of his projects include the THIRD HAND, VIRTUAL ARM, STOMACH SCULPTURE, EXOSKELTON, EXTENDED ARM, PROSTHETIC HEAD, MUSCLE MACHINE, PARTIAL HEAD and WALKING HEAD. 


He has surgically constructing an extra ear on his arm that will be internet enabled, making it a publicly accessible acoustical organ for people in other places. In 2010 he was awarded the Hybrid Arts prize at Ars Electronica and has also a Special Projects Grant by the Australia Council.






Here is his Stomach Sculpture work, which is an art work where an extending/retracting structure, designed to operate in the stomach cavity, was inserted into the body. Brainwaves, bloodflow and muscle signals were amplified and broadcast, and the inside of the lungs, stomach and colon filmed and screened - all of which served to highlight and place in question distinctions between the public and the private as the inside of the body was revealed to be at once both internal and external. 

This work to me is very much the extreme of CCTV, and being filmed where ever you go, i feel he is saying, well you wanna see what i look like on the outside, i'll show you what i look like on the inside as well!




     
Created by performance artist Stelarc, a fully animated 3D head on a screen that can talk, sing, and even generate poetry, all whilst pulling spookily realistic-looking facial expressions was able to detect people’s behavior and colour of their clothes so as to convincingly converse with the audience, who can participate by asking questions via a keyboard. 

Neil Harbisson

                           


Neil Harbisson  artist, musician and performer best known for his self-extended ability to hear colours. He was able to see – or, more accurately, hear – colours for the first time. Harbisson has been fitted with a machine that turns colours into soundwaves, with a different sound representing each hue. The Eye-Borg, as it is known, features a head-mounted digital camera that reads the colours in front of Harbisson and converts them, via a laptop he carries in a backpack, into sound. Because of this, In 2010, he founded the Cyborg Foundation, an international organization to help humans become cyborgs.


"I now see my art as composing music on canvas," says Harbisson, who also now "hears colours" when listening to music – he recently went to a concert where the female performer sang shades of yellow and, he says, the whirr of his Hoover is red. "Before, I was slightly afraid of my art. But now, it's completely different. I am having so much fun with it, painting masses of objects that all have sounds." - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/alternativemedicine/3313425/Eyes-opened-to-sound-of-socks.html

The Cyborg

Cyborg: both biological and artificial (e.g. electronic, mechanical or robotic) parts. 


When it comes to thinking about Cyborgs, what i see if robots, artificial intelligence, sky-net and touchscreen phones.But these aspects are very obvious and frank, with this subject i need to look more deeper into the different aspects of the digital revolution:

• Racism
• Representation of the body
• banks
• how technology has advanced
• The body as a commodity
• Advertising/Billboards
• Audience

Electronics has in a way become an extension of ourselves, and through this many has lost there touch with reality, and rely on it to feel 'normal' and in touch to a parallel universe where they are perceived in a way that they want to be seen. Because of this the real world become unattractive as it can only give you so much, where as the cyber and electronic world can give you very much more.

Through voice controlled technology to touchscreen the digital revolution is taking over, and fast. We are wanting quicker and convenient ways to live our lives, and technology is gladly giving it to us. From relationships on online dating sites to voice controlled consoles we are being given the tools to almost dumb down our minds and let the tech do the work.

These are just some of the aspects of the digital age that i will be looking more into and analysing.