“Personalizing the Immediacy of Reality Augmenting”
5/21/15 – Ongoing
NYC Inspiration
I love the title of this blog post. You see, I’m a creative advantage taker. Especially of new media technologies and software as tools for art making. I speak a lot about that here on this blog as well making art while being mobile. This case is not any different. Follow me below about this first image, I feel like explaining how this new series happened, and how “new artists” are finding themselves via technology, inspiration and immediacy.
Here’s the scenario, situation & impulse. I know that you have had this experience too. I was on a stroll down 39th street in NYC on my way to meeting. I was crossing Park avenue a bit too late and I got caught in between traffic lights. As I waited for the traffic to pass I simply looked up. I noticed the skewed perspective and how the light cast a shadow onto the building in front of me. I found forms, I found shapes, I found what I like aesthetically. The clouds were moving quickly and I grabbed this shot with my Iphone. I admired the image and tweaked it via my instagram app and posted the image. It was another case of “instant creative immediacy.” It had been generated quickly and I was satisfied for the moment…
On my train ride home I decided to re-check my photos from the day. Of course I took more than one! Some were great, some were not so great. A few weeks ago one of my friends, Michael Branson Smith introduced me to an app called to.be cam. I had been kicking it around but had not really nailed down anything solid. I rarely use an app just as it is. I tend to use fragments of them to extend further works. Thus meaning, to later project and recapture, or to convert to VHS quality and screen grab the textures. This is a short list, and will share a more in depth blog post about that soon. I love merging filters and also creating and working with them manually. Of course I cant share all of my techniques at this moment (but I would if you wrote to me) so this image was a nice opportunity to work with the to.be app. I noticed that I had altered something that I had only experienced a few hours earlier. We have that power to do that today.
I find a ton of potential in this as an idea.
What inspires you to the point that you want to manipulate it and make it “more?”
With the city in mind, and its always a source of inspiration for me, I continued onward and generated this series. This week, Im projecting the animations and re-capturing them. Im displacing them outdoors and grabbing still frames as well. I introduced my ART642 class at LIU to the to.be cam and MBS’s second suggestion of clickdragclick.com – check out some of their results here. And go and try them for yourself!
But why stop now? A pattern develops. Via the extension of immediate opportunities through mobile applications, the awareness of one’s surroundings as subject, and an Iphone it seems to me, that more and more people are finding themselves repeating similar patterns. We start off by taking the classic default pictures of anything and everything simply because we can with our device. But through that everyday practice we discover what we visually like, and then we discover the way that we like to capture it. We repeat that process until we can transcend our style into the other images we capture. We become curators of our own work and start to share it. But even then, the static images want to become more. They want to move, we want to animate them and personalize them further. (this means you) We develop a style in that practice as well. We can do this quickly now, and the more we do it, the more we fight the term “artist” even though our friends may accuse us of being such…
and on and on and on…
So, why not bring it all together and see what happens next.
short link to this post – https://www.ryanseslow.com/bmqV1
