Videos – Page 6 – Karyn Easton

Feb 11

Boring, Boring, Boring

Nothing is Ever New – I often tell my students about a great piece of advice that I received as a photography student over 30 years ago. The advice was simple, but it has had a profound effect on my work through the decades. It goes like this…… “When you have your finalised brief or theme – go away and brainstorm 5 ideas and write them down on a piece of paper. Once you have your list, screw it up, or better still tear it up and throw it in the bin. Why???…Because those 5 ideas will probably be the exact same 5 ideas that everyone else will come up with.” I now always pass on this little piece of advice to all my students. They usually give me a look of abject horror, having just spent the last two hours working on the first idea that came into their heads. Yesterday Noah, one of my fellow students, kindly alerted me to an artist who is working very much along the same lines as me. Here is an Instagram link to his work. I am not really surprised by someone else working in my area of trying to marry up […]

Feb 01

by Karyn in Animation, Books, Drawings, Videos, Zoom Meetings 0 comments tags: Animation, Books, Drawings, Videos, Zoom Meetings

Zoom Session 14

The Art of Seeing – This week we ran a really interesting exercise. We were asked to look at a photograph and then look again more closely and then keep repeating this. It is amazing how much can be missed with a cursory glance at something. Our group discovered so much by analysing the image over and over again. The little details gave away lots of information. For example the police officer in our image was wearing a red poppy. Instantly we knew that the photo must have been taken somewhere in the UK in November. The poppy is synonymous with Remembrance Day which happens around that time. This week we also did another 5 minute free writing exercise. Our task was to look around our immediate surroundings and then say what it all meant. I talked about all of the disruption in my front room because of having the room below it plastered. We are extending the house and everything seems quite chaotic at the moment. One thing which I found absolutely fascinating was the idea that my salary will actually be the same as my salary averaged across the salaries of my friends. Even more interesting was the […]

Jan 30

by Karyn in Abstract Art, Ai, Animation, Context, Evaluations, Experimentation, Food for Thought, Ideas, My Work, Videos 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, Animation, Evaluations, Food for Thought, Ideas, Videos

Morphing

Upping the Ante – ‘Time and time wait for no man’ Even within a short space of time the developments in ‘Ai’ assisted creative tools has been astounding! As soon as I realised that text to image was available I remembered my comments that it was only a matter of time before we had text to video. Indeed I wasn’t wrong. Apparently Google is already in a race with a number of other companies to achieve text to video. I have already seen for myself some of the early examples of this which are pretty impressive even at the beta stage. If you would like a pink and blue hippo skateboarding down the street with a banana on its head then you probably won’t have that long to wait. I generated the following text to video imagery. Looking at the videos, I particularly like the morphing effect generated by the software. However, what fascinated me more were the stills that I managed to pull from the Luminogram text to video ‘Ai’ driven generator. Hidden people and buildings seemed to pop in and out of nowhere. I like this idea of ‘hidden’ mysterious images. I have been researching around hidden things […]

Jan 17

by Karyn in Abstract Art, Ai, Ai Chat, Disasters, Evaluations, Experimentation, Ideas, My Learning, My Work, Problem Solving, Risk Taking, Videos 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, ai, Ai Chat, Disasters, Evaluations, Ideas, My Learning, my work, Problem Solving, Risk Taking, Videos

Clocks and Carrier Bags

Time as a Fourth Dimension – Before I go any further, I really need to present this video with sound. The sound is incredibly important, because it adequately and eloquently sums up the disaster that is currently all of my technological devices! Every computer or device I own is creaking at the seams! The video I created below actually sums up how it feels! No words needed. Technology Gone Bad I subtitled this blog ‘Time as a Fourth Dimension’ – I’m not actually going to discuss time as a fourth dimension here, but I do think it sounds great as a subtitle. It’s relevance will become apparent further into this blog. In a previous blog I responded to the work of Vilde Rolfeson. I also had a number of conversations with ChatGPT in the making of the digital pieces presented there. These were inspired by her work. I always felt that her work around the plastic bag landscape offered a myriad of experimental possibilities. Therefore I decided that I would continue with more experimentation based on this. During my conversations with ‘Ai’ I asked for programs to gently destruct or disrupt an image. After a number of […]

Jan 16

by Karyn in Abstract Art, Ai, Ai Chat, Evaluations, Experimentation, Food for Thought, My Work, Research, Videos 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, ai, Ai Chat, Evaluations, Experimentation, Food for Thought, Ideas, my work, Research, Videos

Conversations with Ai

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 […]

Jan 10

Vilde Rolfsen – Inspired Work

Beautiful Destruction – For a few weeks now I have been wrestling with ideas for my research statement. Ideally I would like to integrate some form of current affairs or pressing agenda into my work but I wasn’t quite sure how to approach this. I then remembered a shoot I’d done a little while ago. I stumbled across an artist called Vilde Rolfsen. I found her plastic bag landscapes absolutely fascinating. Not only was her idea clever it was also visually very appealing. Her images are certainly creative. There’s just something special about taking such a mundane object like a plastic bag and transforming it into an amazing landscape. Below is a small gallery of her images. Vilde Rolfeson – Plastic Bag Landscape Responses to Vilde Rolfeson I felt that Vilde Rolfeson had produced something truly unique. However, inspired by her idea I wanted to use her imagery as a base to experiment further. I was also keen to incorporate elements of animation and time into my experimentation as this ties in heavily with my theme. Most of Vilde Rolefson’s plastic bag imagery is light and bright, therefore I decided to take a slightly darker approach. I wanted […]

Jan 03

by Karyn in Abstract Art, Ai, Experimentation, My Learning, My Work, Patterns, Timelapse, Videos 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, ai, Experimentation, My Learning, my work, Patterns, Timelapse, Videos

Onwards…

Holiday Touch Designer Projects Over the Christmas period I felt it was important for me to keep up the momentum with Touch Designer. I am constantly aware that if I want to go down the more generative art route I need to be much more programming literate. Normally when I sit down to an online tutorial I set my camera recording, so that I can produce a time-lapse. I like to produce a time-lapse because it gives a visual snapshot of the passage of time. This is something that is hidden from the viewer when observing final pieces. The tutorials are vastly time consuming so I think that it is interesting to have this time represented in some way. I have numerous time-lapse footage of me working away at the Touch Designer tutorials. Therefore, I think now may be a good time to think of more creative ways of expressing this passage of time. However, for this blog I have included my last tutorial time-lapse as I worked on the video below it. The Touch Designer Time-lapse Results From The Touch Designer Time-lapse Single Images Generated from The Video Above Building in Mouse Interactivity […]

Dec 29

Refik Anadol – Production and Destruction

Refik Anadol Inspired Responses At the beginning of this project I began to examine the possibilities created by Ai generated imagery. I likened Ai to something that had tentacle-like structures. I imagined that these tentacles were expanding and steadily weaving their way into all aspects of our lives. After discovering the work of Refik Anadol, It is clear to see that Ai generated imagery and data visualisation are becoming firmly rooted in the art world. The work of Refik Anadol is truly breathtaking. He is clearly a pioneer in the field of digital art. Below is a video containing examples of his work along with an interview with him talking about his art. Refik Anadol – His Work and Thoughts about Ai Generated Imagery Art Piece Responses to Refik Anadol In his interview Refik makes references to the futuristic classic film ‘Blade Runner’. Through his work he imagines what Ai might look like when it is dreaming. He affords human like qualities to the machine learning that he is observing. Following this line of thinking I wanted to imagine what Ai might look like as it grows and then dies. The following pieces are […]

Dec 22

Too Cold!

Lissajous Curves and Cold Weather – I mentioned in an earlier blog that due to lack of disk space on my hosting package I would need to upgrade my hosting. This is always a tense time when moving files from one server to another. For this reason I needed to come up with a foolproof method of backing up my blog. In the past numerous backups have failed for me (files lost, media libraries lost, databases lost etc.), therefore I knew I couldn’t solely rely on this. However under my reflective planning it was on my todo list to think of an easy but effective way of getting around data loss. I came up with the idea of taking screenshots of my blog. This means that in the event of any data loss all I have to do is insert the screen shot and add any live links (genius!) and it works. Unfortunately when my blog was moved this particular post completely disappeared. However the process of taking a screen shot meant I can quickly post up images of the original post and add in the relevant link. Below is my original post added from screen shots. I’d […]

Dec 21

by Karyn in Artists, Culture, Galleries, Videos 0 comments tags: Artists, Culture, Galleries, Videos

Day Job

End of Year Exhibition – Response to Experience- Like many of my fellow CSM Fine Art Digital students, I am also working while studying. I am currently a lecturer in both Photography and Art and Design across a variety of levels. This year (it varies), I am currently teaching on the Level 3 Diploma in Art and Design and also Foundation Art. In previous years I have taught Level 1 Photography and Animation, ‘A’ level Photography and the Level 3 Extended Diploma in Art and Design. I really enjoy teaching. To me, there’s nothing more rewarding than seeing my students achieve their artistic dreams. Over the years I gained the unofficial role of producing our end of year video. This showcases some of the student work undertaken throughout the year. We have our own gallery space which gives a great opportunity to display lots of work and larger installations. This year we decided to make a video that also showcased our end of year Christmas exhibition titled ‘Response to Experience’. My boss, Pawel Psymanski, thought it would be a nice addition to my blog to add this video. It gives a flavour of what I do in my job alongside […]