My Learning – Page 4 – Karyn Easton

Jul 13

by Karyn in 21 Day Challenge, Augmented Reality, My Learning, My Work, Problem Solving, Risk Taking, Unit 2 Blogs 0 comments tags: 21 Day Challenge, Augmented Reality, My Learning, my work, Problem Solving, Risk Taking, Unit 2 Blogs

21 Day Challenge – Day #1

Thursday 13th July – Today is the start of my 21 day challenge! I have decided to focus mainly on three activities that will help with the overall aims of my project and guided by my study statement. My key areas of focus are as follows: Explore ‘The Art of the Fold’ – Bookbinding Explore augmented reality Continue Research Paper So How did it Go? I started the day full of enthusiasm for diving into augmented reality in order to produce something really amazing! Unfortunately both the universe and my MacBook Pro had other ideas. I decided to start my day by exploring augmented reality with Meta Spark. This is industry leading software and I found it to have lots of functionality. Challenges The first challenge I faced was to free up resources on my MacBook Pro. I reluctantly got rid of Cinema 4d which I just haven’t ever had the time or inclination to explore. Sadly this wasn’t enough and the Meta Spark software still wouldn’t download. So unfortunately Microsoft Excel was next on my hit list. Luckily this gave me the space that I needed. Already I had wasted 20 minutes simply trying to free disk […]

Mar 29

Zoom Session 20 (Low Residency)

Low Residency Part 2 – This is part 2 of the Low Residency. This blog covers the second week of activities. To see what happened in the preceding week please see Zoom Session 19. Low Tech Photography (Monday 10.00am with Felix Loftus) I was very torn about taking this workshop as opposed to the printing workshop. Printing is something that I’ve always been very interested in, but I’ve never really had the opportunity to explore it to any great degree. However the pull of photography coupled with tech had way too much of a ‘pull factor’ for me. Indeed, having taken the workshop I knew I had absolutely made the right choice for me! It was nice to see both Trisha and Ester at the workshop too. When we entered the classroom there were a variety of Rasberry Pi processors on the table. these were hooked up to a variety of lenses. Some were native to Rasberry Pi and some were off the shelf smartphone camera lenses. I hate to admit it but I was in tech heaven! Although I was sad to miss printing I don’t think anything could ‘top’ me messing around with programming and kit. The […]

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 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

by Karyn in Abstract Art, Disasters, Evaluations, Experimentation, My Learning, My Work, Problem Solving 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, Disasters, Evaluations, Experimentation, My Learning, my work, Problem Solving

Disasters and Projects

Turning Negatives into Positives – This week has not been a great week at all! Restful and relaxing is certainly not what I could would have called it. I needed to migrate my existing WordPress blog to a new server, so that going forward I can have unlimited file uploads. Over the last couple of months I have been continually filling up my disc space allowance, therefore things had to change. The technical support from my hosting company was initially quite good and on the surface it looked as if my website migration had gone smoothly. Unfortunately this was not the case! I found that I was unable to log in, I could no longer preview my drafts and my search box was no longer working, and if that wasn’t enough my categories were not displaying properly. To add further insult to injury the tech support team also ‘bailed’ out. Essentially on a scale of 1 to 10 things weren’t as bad as they could have been. For example I could have deleted the whole of my website, or messed up my WordPress theme to the point it was unworkable. However I would still place the disruption at […]

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 Abstract Art, Ai, Evaluations, Experimentation, Food for Thought, Ideas, My Learning, My Work, Patterns, Videos 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, ai, Evaluations, Experimentation, Food for Thought, My Learning, my work, Patterns, Videos

Creative Coding

Discovering Creative Coding with Processing – I thoroughly enjoyed our Zoom Session 10 where we were introduced to ‘Processing’. We had a small workshop that was run by Matthew Edwards. Processing is a simple but effective programming language ideal for anyone looking to undertake creative coding. I was absolutely ‘sold’, indeed I decided to explore further. Processing.org is a really well designed and thought out educational website teaching creative coding for beginners. It allows students to copy and edit code within an interactive browser while working through the online tutorial videos. I was delighted to receive a little certificate once I had completed my first hour of programming tuition. Certificate of Completion Below is my certificate of completion. I can thoroughly recommend the Precessing.org website for anyone who would like to begin a creative coding journey. Recently I have been working with Touch Designer and my last project involved some coding work. Processing has really helped with my understanding of the Touch designer workflow. This week I was able to tackle quite a difficult Touch Designer tutorial about ‘Lissajous Curves’. I believe the success of this project was largely due to understanding what code I was adding and why. This […]

Dec 21

Zoom Session 10

Programming with Processing 😊 – This has to be one of my favourite sessions so far. I love all of my zoom sessions, but the chance to learn a little programming is always a positive for me. Until today I hadn’t come across the programming environment called ‘Processing’. I downloaded the software onto my computer and I attempted to play around with it a little. This was to familiarise myself with it a before the start of our session. I found the tutorials really informative and I very quickly got the ‘gist’ of it. We also had a guest speaker Matthew Edwards, who came in to give us a demonstration and work with us through some example code. It was a very good pace and pitched perfectly for a total beginner like myself. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing the results of my little programs. I also thoroughly enjoyed the group conversation afterwards. Jonathan introduced us to GPT chat. This is an advanced algorithmic program that can write highly intuitive essays from user text prompts. It can also write code. This week I’ve had lots to think about and explore. I have updated my ‘Zentangle’ gallery to reflect all of my little […]

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, […]