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 […]
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 […]
Has Ai Killed Art? – Ai or Artificial Inteligence/Machine Learning has been around for a while now, but never has it’s presence been more keenly felt than in and around the Creative Arts. Producing imagery was once the domain of illustrators and graphic designs. Now it appears that everyone with a computer/tablet/smartphone and a connection to Dalle and Midjourney can produce the most amazing images. At first as a photographer I didn’t feel particularly threatened by ai. I suspected that what I was producing was safe for a while and that everyone would always need good photographers? As a simple test I ran a text prompt through Midjourney – a text to image ai generator. The results to me seemed less than impressive. Below is an example of what I do and what ai thinks I do. To generate the image below I used the text prompt “Oil on Water”. I decided to give the ai a second attempt. Although the result was better, it was still significantly different from the kind of imagery that I was producing. Below is the second time I ran the prompt ‘oil on water’. Fortunately or unfortunately depending upon a […]
