Books – Karyn Easton

May 09

by Karyn in Books, Conclusion, Experimentation, Final Major Project, Final Outcomes, My Work, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: Books, Conclusion, Experimentation, Final Major Project, Final Outcomes, my work, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs

Book Photography

Product Photography for the Balance of Power Book – My book is now fully augmented and the whole of its contents can be viewed in the augmented reality video that I made to accompany the ‘Balance of Power Mobile. A full digital copy of the book can be found here. The next step in my process was to create an image that would represent my book – something that I could use for social media posts and head up any literature that I might like to send out. It might even form the cover of a brochure about the project as a whole. Contact Sheets from Experimental Shoots Refining the Concepts There are many references to nature in my ‘Balance of Power’ Final 5 Minute Video. Therefore, in the first instance I decided to shoot my books outdoors. One of my chosen concepts to explore was having my books with foliage or vines wrapped around it. Below are some of the concepts that I decided to refine further. The original ‘Balance of Power’ Book was a large scale book (30 x 30cm), but sadly when I came to scale the book down, the title wasn’t as prominent. […]

Hanging Around

Choosing a Suitable Stringing Method – Choosing suitable materials and a hanging method for my mobile has to be one of the most challenging aspects so far. I’m way beyond my comfort zone with this! Noah one of my fellow students shared a link by the creative force that once was, namely David Bowie. Im going to put what he said here so that when I struggle I’ve got a point of reference to start things moving again. Today, having produced enough mobile elements to explore hanging and stringing I started running into multiple problems. Some of these included: 1). What kind of stringing method would I like to use 2). How do I arrange the elements neatly enough so that the viewer understands them as binary. 3). What materials should I use to actually string and hang the mobile? 4). Will a smaller prototype actually translate into a much larger one? The problems above were to name only a few. I spent the evening trying to source suitable hanging materials. I managed to source a very good older pdf on the subject of mobile making which helped a lot! How to Make Mobiles How to […]

Research Paper Thoughts and Background

Research Paper 3 – Thoughts, Background and Final Version That’s it – no more! Yesterday and today became the ‘final straw’ with my research paper! Why? Because yesterday my ‘dying’ on its ‘last legs’ MacBook Pro decided that it was going to literally lose all of my research papers and drafts. I know it’s somewhat unbelievable but this actually happened! Months of hard work seemed to have disappeared in front of my eyes. The files were no longer there! I tried opening programs that I had used to construct the last version of my paper, but it was always the same message ‘File cannot be found’. I even convinced my self that there was some evil hacker trying to sabotage my work, that’s how upset I was. At one point I even thought I must be having a nightmare and that I would wake up soon. As I had been editing the document in Adobe’s PDF editing program I thought to myself, ‘Ha’ there will be a copy stored in Adobe’s creative cloud. So, feeling somewhat smug, I looked at my recent documents there, only to discover that on opening my research paper it gave an error message saying ‘bad […]

Aug 13

by Karyn in Books, Research, Research Paper Journey, Unit 2 Blogs 0 comments tags: Books, Research, Research Paper Journey, Unit 2 Blogs

Action Research

A Leap from Practice to Research – After working so hard producing digital artworks I am becoming increasingly aware that my research paper is being neglected. This imbalance needs to be corrected. In order to do this I am going to engage in a form of research each day. This is so that hopefully I will have a substantive body of work prior to my return to work at the end of this month. Starting with the most recent activity and working downwards this post is a working document of my research activity over the next few weeks. For a more formal list of my activities please see my Research Timeline and my Research Resource List Day #21 – Saturday 2nd September – Further refining the second draft of the research paper and integrating research sources and compiling coherent appendices. Day #20 – Friday 1st September – Compiling the second draft to incorporate all of the polls and revising it to meet the target word count. Day #19 – Thursday 31st August – Refining headings and layout of the second draft of the research paper. Day #18 – Wednesday 30th August – Commencing the second draft […]

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 17

by Karyn in Books, Drawings, Food for Thought, Hand Written, Handwriting, Zentangles, Zoom Meetings 0 comments tags: Books, Drawings, Food for Thought, Hand Written, Zentangles, Zoom Meetings

Zoom Session 12

Steal Like an Artist – For a long time now I have been aware that in the art and design world it is very difficult to find something that is completely new. There are elements borrowed from one piece of work that may be copied or changed to make a more exciting piece of work. Even in my own practice it feels like there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. I find there is nothing more frustrating to think I’ve found a great idea, only to research it and discover that actually I’m way ‘behind the curve’. However in today’s talk this became even more pronounced when we had some examples quoted from artist Austin Kleon’s book titled: ‘Steal like and Artist’. Kleon decided to research into his own style of art. He found that over the centuries there had in fact been not one but three other artists working in a similar way. These were namely Brian Gysin (1916 – 1986), Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963) and Caleb Whitefoord (1734 – 1810). Apparently they had all been doing something similar. When this is seen across the ages it really does show that nothing at all is ever new. Indeed […]

Jan 03

by Karyn in Artists, Books, Culture, Food for Thought, Galleries, Ideas, Lectures 0 comments tags: Artists, Books, Culture, Food for Thought, Galleries, Ideas, Lectures

Dean Kenning Lectures

Summary of the Dean Kenning Lectures Term One Below are short summaries of the Dean Kenning Lectures that began this term Oct 2022. I will document these on a termly basis and include relevant slides. The Art and Politics of Statues 18/10/22 – This was the first lecture at the start of the term. I think that the key takeaway here was that sometimes it isn’t always appropriate to ‘hijack’ someone else’s cause because it could be seen as self serving self promotion. The case in point was the Marc Quinn ‘A Surge of Power’ (Jen Reid) erected 15th July 2020. Anti-racism protesters in England pulled down a statue of a 17th-century slave trader while demonstrating in solidarity with the US Black Lives Matter movement. Quinn surreptitiously erected the statue early on the morning of 15th July 2020. Although this would seem like an act of solidarity on his part as a white male, it raises questions about the true motivation behind it. Was Quinn simply trying to use a political situation in order to further his own career? Would it have been better to have community art erected instead of art from a white male already making a […]

Dec 21

by Karyn in Drawings, Food for Thought, Research, Zentangles, Zoom Meetings 0 comments tags: Books, Drawings, Food for Thought, Research, Zentangles, Zoom Meetings

Zoom Session 9

Playing Catch-Up – Even though I was only away in London for a few days, I feel there is so much that I need to catch up on! I found zoom session 9 on the playlist and managed to watch it all. Julia Flood, librarian at CSM gave a very informative presentation about the library and it’s services that are available to us. This is something that I want to explore further and I will be documenting this as I begin my research journey. I really do want to take full advantage of what the library has to offer as I felt Julia’s talk was very inspiring! In the meantime please see below for my weekly ‘Zentangle’ Design. I felt a little out at sea this week with all of the information about the library. This is why I chose to produce an image of a boat. It certainly brought me back down to Earth in terms that I really do need need do properly conducted research. CSM has access to all kinds of wonderful resources that I really need to explore. I have already started to do some basic keyword searches and I think that help with materials will […]

Nov 17

by Karyn in Books, Drawings, Ideas, My Work, Patterns, Zentangles, Zoom Meetings 0 comments tags: Books, Drawings, Ideas, my work, Patterns, Zentangles, Zoom Meetings

Zoom Session 7

A Little Confession – Before I begin to document our zoom session from this week I have a little confession to make. I heard someone say that this was zoom session six. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that this week’s session was zoom session seven. The reason I’m so sure is because each week I take the time to draw myself a little zentangle. I counted up my zentangles and I have seven. Therefore I think this week is week seven, but of course I may be wrong. As we were discussing ‘active listening’ I thought that now was probably a really good time to ‘fess’ up to my little ongoing drawing activity. I thoroughly enjoy our zoom sessions, I feel it’s a time for me to learn as opposed to teaching, which as a lecturer is a nice concept. When I’m listening I enjoy drawing. Since I seem to be mainly locked in a digital world at the moment, it brings just a small dose of the physical into my weekly meeting. I also find it very relaxing and for some strange reason it seems to help me concentrate more. I set myself a few […]

Nov 11

by Karyn in Ai, Books, Food for Thought, Tasks, Zoom Meetings 0 comments tags: ai, Books, Food for Thought, Tasks, Zoom Meetings

Zoom Session 6

Elusive Taxonomies – As always, I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s zoom meeting. I was introduced to the term ‘Elusive Taxonomies’. This isn’t a term that I was familiar with, but it has provided much food for thought. Our breakout group felt that the language was very formal. We discussed how the word taxonomy suggested the pigeonholing or categorisation of things. We found the word elusive in this context somewhat harder to define. We wondered if this may have been a word used by Darwin. Jonathan gave us some interesting pointers and interesting reading material. I screenshot some of the main points for future reference including some of the recommended literature from the session that I would like to read. Elusive Taxonomies a Discussion Task for Week 6 This week we have been asked to explore some reading material and present back to our peers. Early indications from my ‘Tag Cloud’ is clearly showing that I have an interest in Ai and it’s relationship with art. For this reason I decided to choose the book ‘Ai Super – Powers – China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order’ by Kai-Fu Lee. Key Discoveries from the Book Below […]