Ideas – Page 4 – Karyn Easton

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 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 […]

Nov 26

London

Time & Travel It’s Better to Travel Than to Arrive? – This was a quote I stumbled across earlier this year. Unfortunately I’m not sure who said it, but given I was travelling to London I decided to use it anyway. This was the first of two trips to London this year. As I am a keen photographer I decided to document anything interesting. I couldn’t help but notice that the light was particularly beautiful at Newton Abbot train station. However this was nothing compared to the beauty of the ceiling structures at Paddington train station. Below is a small collection of images including the view from my hotel window. A Few Random Shots with My Smartphone Unfortunately I had decided to leave my DSLR at home. However, should I ever decide to shoot Paddington station again these are the kind of shots I would take with my DSLR. My smartphone is great for this activity, but maybe not so good with its pixel count. The Most Underwhelming Time-Lapse Ever! At the start of this blog I muted – it is better to travel than to arrive? I’m not sure that is strictly true, but just in case, […]

Nov 23

by Karyn in Ideas, My Work, Opportunities, Risk Taking, Timelapse, Videos 0 comments tags: Ideas, my work, opportunities, Risk Taking, Timelapse, Videos

Line in the Sand

A Sand Pendulum – Discovering Hidden Motion – I have been meaning to put up this short sand pendulum unboxing video for well over a week now. I’ve done so much work lately in the digital space, it feels like the right time to move back into the physical again. Shortly after posting this I will be travelling to London which will be a very physical experience and I’m looking forward to documenting that. In the meantime here is the start of my journey looking at motion. This may be something that I want to incorporate into my work if possible but at the moment it remains just an idea. Sand pendulums have always fascinated me. I love their rhythmic motion and the patterns they create as they follow their path. This blog is really about exploring another facet of my thinking. I feel that I still have so many ideas to explore and so little time to do it before I need to narrow my focus. I am are going to be working with physical ‘things’, digital ‘things’ or a combination of both? What do I want to ‘say’ through my work? Do I even want to ‘say’ anything? […]

Nov 18

by Karyn in Experimentation, Ideas, My Learning, My Work, Patterns, Timelapse, Videos 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Ideas, My Learning, my work, Patterns, Timelapse, Videos

A Tiny Breakthrough

Is it Slowly Sinking In? – I am trying to learn the software program Touch Designer. The reason is that I believe it will help me change my art in new ways and allow me to produce light reactive light installations. Unfortunately I have never been able to write code which I feel is a massive disadvantage. I was heartened by the book I read about Ai for my presentation. The author stated that the Chinese learned much of their early social media app programming skills by copying from Silicon Valley. This is exactly how I’m attempting to learn. I watch tutorials and I try to understand why I am building my network nodes in the way that I’m shown by the video tutorials. Over the last week I feel that I’m gaining a little more confidence. When things don’t work I’m finding my mistakes easier to correct and I feel much less lost while navigating around the TD (Touch Designer) interface. I’m still somewhat bemused as to why I build the nodes in the way that I’m instructed, but I’m starting to feel that the understanding of this will eventually happen. Last week I was pretty sure that this […]

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 12

by Karyn in Experimentation, Ideas, My Work, Patterns, Problem Solving, Research, Timelapse, Videos 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Ideas, my work, Patterns, Problem Solving, Research, threats, Timelapse, Videos

Chladni Patterns Revisited

Further Experimentation with the Chladni Kit – As I’m interested in hidden phenomena such as sound vibrations I wanted to shoot some footage showing how these could be visualised. I purchased a Chladni kit, but I had missed some fundamental assembly instructions in the manual. This was probably on of the main issues holding me back from making more sound patterns. The creator of the kit on seeing my time-lapse videos kindly pointed this out to me and I made the necessary changes. I believe that as a direct result of these changes I managed to make another pattern. While making the new pattern it was fascinating to watch the grains of sand as they vibrated up and down on the plate. I tried to capture this as best as I could, but unfortunately my light levels were too low. The video piece I created is below. Please note this is a very early experiment and I shall be re-shooting this with greatly increased light levels and a much higher frame rate. The increased light levels will allow me to increase my depth of field so more grains of sand appear sharp and in focus. The higher frame rate […]

Nov 11

by Karyn in Ideas, My Work, Opportunities, Patterns, Risk Taking 0 comments tags: Ideas, my work, opportunities, Patterns, Risk Taking

Network Patterns

Surprising Results – I was quite pleased with the results of my Blender computer generated Chladni Patterns. However, just as the title to this blog suggests the end results may not necessarily have been the most interesting part. In order to generate the patterns in Blender I needed to create a network. I found this tentacle-like network (almost like neurones) quite fascinating. I cover the network diagram in my post ‘Blender – Who Knew?’ Following on from this I decided to ‘stylise’ the network and from there I created some patterns. A Stylised Network Patterns Created From The Stylised Network A Collage of These Ideas Below is a collage of these images together with the original stylised image at the top. This is purely an experiment and I will save these designs for later as they may prove useful in future projects.

Nov 08

Blender – Who Knew?

Using Blender to Simulate Chladni Patterns – In order to make a successful Chladni Pattern, it is important to generate a strong tone. Where fingers are placed on the plate is also crucial. I have discovered that to produce a tone and beautiful pattern is not a quick or easy process. It takes both practice and patience. Jokingly, I feel that at the end of this process, I may not have great Chladni patterns, but I’ll probably manage a grade 8 in the violin! Joking aside, this is a real and fundamental problem that I need to solve in order to move forward. In order to help me work with my bow and plate I looked for a number of YouTube tutorials of which there were a few. The people in the videos made the bowing and Chladni pattern generation look so easy! I spoke to the maker of my kit and he explained that actually it’s not that easy and practice and patience makes perfect. Below are a couple of videos where pattern generation is made to look really simple. Chladni Plate with Violin Bow Chladni Patterns – Aluminium Plate and Violin Bow Time is Not […]

Nov 02

by Karyn in Experimentation, Ideas, My Work, Research, Timelapse, Videos 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Ideas, my work, Research, Timelapse, Videos

Chladni Plate

The Chladni Plate – Sound has always fascinated me. I remember being introduced to an oscillator at school. I was completely mesmerised by the waves generated by sounds. Later in life I discovered Chladni Plates. The Chladni Plate was named after its German inventor Ernst Chladni, who was an early pioneer of experimental acoustics. He discovered that by using a violin bow to vibrate metal plates covered in sand, a number of distinct patterns emerged. The patterns would change with the pitch and the tone of the sound vibrations. The idea of sound creating hidden patterns is something that I want to explore. I am intrigued by anything hidden or unseen. The Chladni plate patterns, in my opinion, falls nicely into this bracket. The patterns of sound are hidden until they are revealed by the vibrating sand covered plates. In order to experiment with this phenomena, I decided to source an authentic Chladni plate kit with a bow. Some Chladni plate kits come with electronic tone generators. However I wanted to remain as authentic as possible and I was really excited to find someone who made these kits as close to the original as possible. Below is my Chladni Plate unboxing […]