How to Find Meaning? – Having recently finished 21 days of an augmented reality investigation followed by another 21 days of research paper investigation and compilation, I’m feeling somewhat down. I think that primarily it is due to my investigations into AI generated art. The further I dig into this, the more depressed I become. I’m sure this is just a transient phase. Why am I so sad? It’s because over the years I learnt so much about photography. I collected a wealth of knowledge on this subject especially because each year I tried to present my students with increasingly technically challenging workshops. I was proud that I was able to replicate pretty much any style of photography from slow shutter work to speed shooting, star trails to zoom burst, macro photography to physiograms. I felt I had reached the pinnacle when I managed to work out the technique that Michael Jackson (the photographer not the pop singer), uses to make his ethereal Luminograms. Even today colleagues are badgering me to give up that secret which I flatly refuse. It’s so beautifully simple yet complex at the same time and I nailed it! However, with the advent of AI art […]
Write Me a Program, A Poem and Then Some – Over the last few weeks I have spent a considerable amount of time researching generative art. I have looked at what it is, how to create it and the best tools to generate it. I have worked with a number of Touch Designer tools which are great for this and I’ve also looked at Processing which is a very popular creative coding tool. I’ve also created a Git Hub account and I’m currently learning all of the associated jargon so that I can look for potential collaborations. Although I have learned an incredible amount about programming, I am still not very conversant with it. I find that it does not make logical sense to me. However, that said, I am at the stage where I can more or less understand what a program is doing and I can amend variables accordingly. This is a massive step forward from only a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I might struggle to actually write a full program. This is where I wanted to test the limits of ChatGPT. This natural language simulator can produce code and I was curious to find out if […]
Monday Guest Lectures – Henri Kalama – was born and raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he received his academic artistic training in painting. He later moved to China where he spent six years and completed a master in arts. Henri, relatively early on, has moved towards abstraction with a particular focus on colors, which he sees as a main channel for emotions. While he stills lives and works in the Congo, he is representative of a trend that aims to evolve from certain stereotypes in what is generally considered as “African” art. “Humanity is moving to a point of connection, a planet village, a boundless world – all of which I want to express with my work. The all connecting languages are music and art – both of which express and invoke feelings which everybody understands, no matter where they come from. The umbrella term which I use for my work is “cosmic vibrations”. I am convinced that there are some things – words, emotions and spirituality- that can’t be transmitted through human languages, but only through colors. Different tones of colors, to me, are the carriers of different feelings which can only be expressed through art […]
