Intro to Visual Practice / Fall 2010

For my project I chose to take a very bland space and alter the way it was presented to make it into art.  I did this by taking around 90 pictures of my apartment.  I stood in the same place, slowing panning up and down, side to side, to make sure I had  180 degrees of my apartment represented in the photographs.  I then opened these photos in photoshop and arranged them to create a panorama of my apartment.  It was impossible, however, to get a completely exact representation.  (Like what one would have gotten had they used a panoramic camera.) There are many areas that are represented multiple times in the image.  The viewer is confused, but the space also has a strange way of making sense.

There is more to communication then simply the spoken or written word.  Visual images are also a part of the human language.  An obvious example of visuality as language would be in a diagram or map. Visual and spoken language are interdependent modes of communication.

Perception is how each and every person obtains awareness of visual information.  Each person lets their own experiences effect how they perceive things.  People from different cultures/ backgrounds take visual queues in different ways and thus they react differently to them.  Perception allows different people to see very different things in the same image.

Click Here

For my drawing machine, I chose to make a camera.  I was thinking back on our last assignment, on light and color and thought my machine could draw through the medium of light.  Henri Cartier- Bresson once said “photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.”  Thus, a camera is the ultimate machine for an instantaneous drawing.

The camera I made was a simple pinhole one.  I had previously made a rather intricate pinhole in the past. However, without the proper resources here I chose to make one out of a can, a cylindrical vessel painted black, a bit of tape, and photo paper.

The camera worked surprisingly well and I had little difficulty finding a consistent shutter speed at around 30 seconds.