Generative record cover

Had this idea the other day, gonna work on it a bit. Here is the very start; built in processing, reading mp3 tags and visualising the spectrum. Doesn’t really work much because the colour is arbetry [atm] and the image gets muddy after the track runs too long. But it is a basis of concept. Will write more about why soon.

Paulus swop 2

Straight from my swop tutorial with Paulus I feel weird. He was pretty tough with the duotone prints [as he was went I talked about that intention in the first crit.] He is not convinced by them at all, especially with the graveyard photos. He talked about the problems of cliches and that is totally fair. He doesn’t see any particular link in the thinking between having those photographs, wanted to print them and the duotone silkscreen process. I think there is a link that I can make it clear, and given that the feedback on the prints at Sadhna’s crit on friday was generally pretty good I think I shouldn’t give up with them. However I need to write a robust reasoning for using the duotone to reproduce those photographs. It will need to contain:

1. analysis of the effect of the printing in the experiment
2. an analysis of the intention of the photographs
3. specific reasons that the effects of the printing compliment the photographic intentions
4. the purpose of the final prints

We also talked about the design within parameters book, however didn’t really get as far as the book just a more general talk. Paulus was trying to find possible links between the two projects to help me with the prints. He was much more interested in the situation of the custom hats. In particular he was interested in the way the hats re-approached the cliches of american high school sportsware. That was not something I had contiously thought about with that design, though I am sure it is largely the reason for the design of the deluxe hat.

Anyhow after writing this I feel a bit better about it all. The problem is that I feel both times I’ve seen Paulus I’ve come across as an idiot and that pisses me off because it means I was being one.

duotone prints

nuff misprints but interesting outcomes. The tonal qualities of the best prints are pretty strange but enjoyable.

duotone printing

I’ve been working on some prints that use duotone colouring without any black. A few years ago I was trying to work out if it might be possible to set up a very niche high quality journal publication for bmx concentrating on writing and a more fine art photographic approch. I spent some time trying to work out a practical and interesting way to economically produce something. I thought about 1/2 colour litho and on-demand digital print. In the end the other person I was talking it through with thought that photographs had to be full colour and we left that alone, and in the end the project very really got started but I was left wondering about duotone printing. So recently I decided to experiment with duotones in the silkscreen studio to see if I could get something out of it. I used this photograph:

Another prompt for me to print from this photograph is that my general approach to photography has matured now to quite a specific thing; I try to use my camera to make soft humanist images, these images are about a more emotive response to a situation that dispassionate observation. There are trying to not be observation but more like a painting or something. Anyhow the softness and blur in many of them I felt might convert well to a ink process as opposed  to making C-Type prints.

I mocked up an idea in photoshop using the blending modes; however I knew that this would never represent the real action of the ink in the studio.

Using an orange and a dark yellow I tried to make a blend of colour that represented the feel of the photograph. It was going to be impossible to have a gamut as wide as a 4 colour process so I knew that the image would become stylized and I tried to embrace that.

I printed this image just over a week ago and I must photograph and consolidate [into words] my findings…

iiz.com 2

http://iizindustries.com/

So this has been one of my main struggles recently. I am building this using CakePHP and still don’t really fully get MVC. However this site is almost done [for now at least] and would be closer if I kept offline versions of cake dev files and Code hadn’t randomly deleted the view for individual items!!!

Check out the sweet favicon tho… It somehow makes the box look at a slant too!

QR codes

I thought a while ago that I might use QR codes in a project. I wasn’t sure what that project would be and I still am not. In a crit with Paulus he said to be sure it wasn’t just because of the tech to use them, and he is very right. I had made a few containing not particaully interesting text

But that isn’t much or enough. It seems to me that the potential of these surely has to be more than just a good way to deliver a vCard to someones address book, but I have no idea how to find that potential. Today I tried to deconstruct them and see if I could build one from scratch and create random data.

this is how they work. So I tried to build from the squares and timing info.

But these don’t do anything, and randomly adding data doesn’t work either. So I think thats it for now. Depressingly I will probably only use these technology for a vCard delivery. oh well…

not been using this

I haven’t been using this blog at all for a while. It doesn’t really feel natural, and it never gives me comments. I’m pretty good at internal dialoge [lol] so no idea why I am putting it on a webpage. anyhow I’m gonna try and use it more again. OR should I user tumblr, it might be a good platform for what I want…