Compare + Contrast

Context – I like how they both have interpreted the change in technology in their own way. Beeple has shown the past mixed with present day technology and Grimes has given us the future of technology.

Grimes’ ‘Newborn 4′ (from the WarNymph collection) is based on the theme of Anthropocene which is what we are currently doing in the world to harm the environment which is portrayed by the use of the Godess/baby cherub character who is fighting against the outdated ideas and corruption from the past. Whereas Beeples’ ‘Home Planet’ (from the Everydays 2020 collection) is based on the fear and obsession with developing technology which is shown by mixing the past with present. The two knights which are from the past where technology was very basic and did not really exist.

Formal Elements – They are both digital images not images taken from a camera of a real life thing meaning that the light is edited on and is not from natural light. The light in Beeple’s ‘Home Planet’ gives the sense of natural light coming from the left hand side and creates shadows throughout the image creating a lot of tonal range within the brown landscape. This is unlike Grimes’s ‘Newborn 4’ where there is not much light coming through and the image seems to be set at a sunset therefore not much natural daylight. However the image still has a high tonal range in the machinery and the cherubs wings creating a very contrasting look, making the machinery look even more manmade and technical. Beeple’s image is more warm toned than Grimes’s which is more cool toned but both have high saturation levels making the colours stand out to the viewer.

Beeples’ has a lot of depth to the image with multiple subjects in the foreground, middle ground and background which helps lead the viewers eye using the golden ratio/Fibonacci sequence to lead them around the image. Starting in the centre of the image at the astronaut then moving around to the top left corner following down to the bottom right hand corner where the knights are positioned creating a spiral shape. In contrast Grimes’ does not seem to follow any rule when leading the viewers eye around the image or have much depth but is similar as the viewer is originally drawn to the centre where the main subject (the cherub) is placed then the viewer explores around the cherub (the machinery).

Both images have different textures, for example Beeple’s is more natural textures like the land and rocky landscape whereas Grimes’s has the robotic, machinery texture making it feel more manmade than Beeple’s natural landscape. This also reflects in the lines and shapes in both images as Grimes’s is more geometric.

Mood – The mood in both images is sorrowful in the sense that the main subjects in both seem to be trapped or immobile. Beeple’s work has an astronaut which looks like it has been left there abandoned for a while and not moved like a derelict building, it may also reflect to the idea of an end to an era that has been left. Grimes’s main subject being the cherub trapped in a machine gives the sense of reflection towards what the world currently is and what is being done with technology.

CONCEPT: What will the future of Jersey look like as a community in the metaverse?

3 Words: Peaceful, united, diverse

A sentence: This will be a place where people feel welcome to express their individuality and embrace the communities they belong to.

A Paragraph: As a group we made the decision to incorporate the two communities of religion and LGBTQ+ into our project, aiming to capture what the future metaverse will look like. This Metaverse has been described a potential utopia, where all people can exist in harmony together. With this information we have decided to bring to light certain issues that occur within the crossover of these communities, which would need to be resolved in order for this potential utopia to even exist. The issue we are going to touch on with this project is the homophobia and hate, within certain religions such as Christianity, towards the LGBTQ+ community and how often people are made to chose between the two. From this we are aiming to create a film and pieces of photography that reflect the struggle that people who belong to these communities endure, and how we are able to create a space that they can both exist peacefully if people learn to be more accepting.

CONTENT: How will you make your film?

Our film will be composed of video recordings that display scenes relating to religion, such as churches, and scenes of protest against the LGBTQ+ community, as well as representatives of LGBTQ+ people. This will be put together in the format of montages accompanied by a dramatic musical score in the background.

Beeple

Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann is an american graphic designer who creates a variety of digital work including short films, Creative Commons VJ loops, NFTs and VR work. He has done work for big companies such as Apple, Space X, Coca-cola, Adobe, Samsung and has worked on concert visuals for music artists Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Imagine Dragons, Katy Perry, Zedd and many more.

Beeple’s work has also featured on Louis Vuitton’s Women’s Spring 2019 collection as well as window displays for their stores. He also collaborated with them to build a custom handbag including bendable LED screens that featured in his videos.

Everydays — The 2020 Collection

The World’s First ‘Major’ NFT Art Exhibition Is About to Take Place in Beijing, Headlined by Beeple, Fewocious, and Mad Dog Jones

Everydays the 2020 collection focuses on society’s alternating obsession and fear of technology. Showcasing digital images which incorporate the old with the new and mixing natural landscapes with objects/living things which do not match and would not work together.

“As generational tastes shift, we felt it important to support an exhibition that showcases a demographic’s interest that has had little previous institutional examination,” “We hope this exhibition will help propel the dialogue surrounding crypto-art from the fringes into the mainstream.” – Elliot Safra, a partner at AndArt Agency.

This work by Beeple uses the same concept as the work we want to produce as a group, focusing on the generational change in the world and universe.

Everydays – The First 5000 Days

His work Everydays—The First 5000 Days was for sale in the first entirely digital art auction. The work currently sits at $3.5 million.

‘The First 5000 Days’, the 1st purely digital NFT based artwork offered by a major auction house has sold for $69,346,250, positioning him among the top three most valuable living artists.

Highest prices ever paid—at auction or private sale—for an artwork by an artist living at time of sale:

Adjusted price(in millions of USD)	Original price(in millions of USD)	Work	Artist	Date	Venue	Ref.
131	110	Flag	Jasper Johns	2010	Private sale	[1]
125	100	For the Love of God	Damien Hirst	August 2007	Private sale	[2]
92	91.1	Rabbit	Jeff Koons	May 2019	Christie’s	[3][4]
93	90.3	Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)	David Hockney	November 2018	Christie’s	[5]
103	80	False Start	Jasper Johns	October 2006	Private sale	[6]
69	69.3	Everydays: The First 5000 Days	Beeple	March 2021	Christie’s	[7]
65	58.4	Balloon Dog (Orange)	Jeff Koons	November 2013	Christie’s	[8]

Beeple created a new artwork every day for 13 years, creating the artwork Everydays – The First 5000 Days.

An NFT Artwork by Beeple Just Sold for an Unbelievable $69 Million at Christie’s—Making Him the Third Most Expensive Living Artist at Auction

Grimes

Grimes is well known for her music but also her NFTs. She combines the styles of gamer fantasy, anime and manga and science fiction among other genres.

WarNymph Collection

https://niftygateway.com/collections/warnymphvolume1

WarNymph is the Goddess of Neo-Genesis. She battles outdated ideas and decay in society that threatens the future and sheds her old skin of corruption. The baby angel (Cherub) is a version Grimes including her iconic tattoos. The cherub exists in a virtual world within the themes of mythology and future creating an extension on the expanding metaverse.

She creates this by using a human form (Grimes) and merging a photogrammetry scan (using photos to map and take measurements) and a retopologised mesh that was made into different forms. Essentially making a digital version of herself.

This project explores the idea of identity in the vitual world and the fluidity with being able to create ourselves into different avatars and make new worlds.

Pieces which include new music or themes from new music from Grimes:

This first limited edition NFT release is her earliest visual form and is only the start as she plans on creating a mythical universe called Oth3rkin and WarNymph is part of it.

This work from Grimes showcases what we want to do as a group for our NFT, creating a future universe where technology is a big part of the change. The machines she uses in her work look alien to us in the current world but will be the new normal like the evolution from paper to typewriter to computer and now laptop.

https://www.businessinsider.com/grimes-nft-art-warnymph-sells-for-millions-20-minutes-2021-3

https://www.gale.info/en/database/reading/homosexuality-and-transgenderism-in-the-quran

https://www.catholichawaii.org/media/224239/bible_verses_about_homosexuality.pdf

Cindy Sherman

Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. For four decades, Cindy has probed the construction of identity, playing with the visual and cultural codes of art, celebrity, gender, and photography.

Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills comprises of over seventy black and white photographs made between 1977 and 1980.  When thinking about this series, some aspects of her entire body of work immediately come to mind: disguise and theatricality, mystery and voyeurism, melancholy and vulnerability. The artist initially started these series in her apartment, using her own interior as setting for the scenes. Her subject links very closely to ours, as she recreated typical movie scenes of a woman. Her film stills allowed the audience to imagine and make up scenarios and stories from a simple photograph.  The 70 Film Stills immediately became flashpoints for conversations about feminism, postmodernism, and representation, and they remain her best-known works.

“Each individual image creates a distinguished scene. Untitled Film Still #21 for example, reminds of a scene from an outdated television show or movie, with the woman in the picture as leading heroine, wearing a vintage 1950s outfit and looking captivated by something outside the frame. This creates suspense: we will never know what happens across the street from this woman. It makes the image not so much about what is happening in the picture, but more about what happened before and after the moment it was shot. This narrative element is characteristic of Untitled Film Stills. The scenes are recognisable as film stills – imitating typical cinematic angles, lighting, and dramatisation – but they come from no particular movie.” – Josephine Van de Walle.

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In the time period that these photographs were taken, the second wave of feminism was ongoing and women were protesting for their employment rights- above, you can see Cindy posing as a woman in the kitchen in image 1 and 8 representing the typical housewife- however in image 1 she is wearing a male blazer, perhaps hinting at the fact that this is not where all women belonged. During this wave of feminism we come across a phrase called the ‘Male Gaze’ which means: ‘the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer’. This is represented in image 6- Cindy is posing as a woman in her nightdress, showing her body with her face partially covered which potentially represents how women were objectified in movies of the past and often even in the present.

We had a workshop led by Yulia Makeyeva using a combination of materials to work with such as images from, People Make Jersey exhibition panels and fabrics, textiles, beads, ribbons etc.

The aim of this workshops is to combine traditional methods of making art (analogue), such as embroidery and stitching with digital media like photography to create a short stop animation movie as a GIF.

The method and process

When making my piece I took photos to document the process. I used materials from the “People Make Jersey Exhibition” canvas wall displays, which were used before the exhibition closed. I cut up different elements and stitched them together, as well as stitching designs onto the picture of St. Thomas Church I found.

How to make a GIF in Photoshop
1. Create layer for each image
2. Window > timeline
3. Select > Create Frame Animation
4. Drop Menu > Make frames from Layers
5. Timeline > select Forever
6. File > Export > Save for Web Legacy > reduce image percent to 35%

This is the process of me making my “Demonic Church” piece. The last frame on the animation is slightly longer than all the other images, since it is the final result and I would like people to see the finished work.

We had a workshop with Yulia Makeyeva in which we learnt about a few different sewing patterns and working with different materials such as fabrics, rope and textiles etc.

The goal was to create a GIF from different images taken in different points of the process. Our pieces were made from the wall display canvas from our trip to the Jersey Museum before the summer about Identity and Community.

I chose a few different snippets and worked with an Alien card for people immigrating to Jersey, a image from the Warsaw Arsenal and a memorial. I cut out the image of the person on the Alien card and replaced it with a different woman’s face. I then stitched the words Warsaw Arsenal and Memorial onto the image so that it looked messy and barely attached. I then cut a gap for some of the memorial to come through. Then I attached the different cut outs and had my final piece.

Below are the 5 images taken of my tapestry with some other images showing the rough steps I took to create a GIF.

Below is my final outcome of my tapestry in GIF form.