As a group, we will be focusing on the theme of generations and the generational difference between lifestyles. For example the way people dressed, the inside of their homes and the way they went about their day-to-day lives.
In more detail, we will be focusing on fashion throughout the generations, specifically 70’s, 2000’s, present day and how fashion will be in the future.
For our 30 second animated film we plan to use a projector to project an image of Jersey in each generation, with a person walking through in an outfit from that period of time to show how fashion trends have changed over the years.
Our digital image will be a picture from each clip of each outfit trend in a line from one side of the image to another, inspired by this image below…
The Occupation Tapestry was the biggest community art project ever undertaken in Jersey, and made by Islanders for Islanders. It was conceived in order to tell the story of what life was like during the five years of German occupation.
In 1995, the award-winning Occupation Tapestry was woven by Islanders to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the liberation from five years of occupation by the German armed forces during the Second World War. It is 13 panels, created from the memories and stories of Islanders who experienced it first-hand. The tapestry is held in the Maritime Museum.
Jersey spirit runs through the Occupation Tapestry. Each of the original 12 panels were created in a different Jersey parish and the 13th panel toured all 12 parishes, each of which depicted a scene of local life during the German Occupation.
The Occupation Tapestry was unveiled by Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, on 9th May 1995, fifty years after the first English “Tommy” soldiers came ashore to liberate Jersey after the surrender of the German garrison on the same day.
In the museum, each of the tapestry panels has an interactive screen in front of it. By touching the screen, information, including photographs and film, tell you about the tapestry, and also what life was like back then.
Materials used to make this tapestry were 1,418 of 25 gram hanks of Appletons Crewel wool, comprising 275 shades of 52 different colours; 24 metres by 100cm wide, 16 threads to the inch, Single Brown Canvas. Each panel measures 72 inches by 34 inches, there are 626,688 stitches per panel. In all, the twelve panels contain 7,520,256 stitches
Beeple is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator, known for using various mediums in creating comical, illusive works that makes political, social commentary while using pop culture figures as references.
Beeple sold a piece of work for $69 million called ‘The First 5000 Days’. It is a collage of his work starting at the beginning of his project over 13 years. This sale positions him “among the top three most valuable living artists”, according to the place his NFT was auctioned at. Vignesh Sundaresan, known to the cryptocurrency community as ‘MetaKovan’, purchased his NFT.
Beeple says – ” I do view this as the next chapter of art history”
Beeple’s work has become so popular and valuable due to his large fan base of 2.5 million followers across social media platforms.
Grimes
In her NFT’s, she explores the theme of Anthropocene, this is where relating to the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
Grimes made a video called ‘Delete Forever’. The video includes a queen counting jewels as the world burns around her
Grimes has sold $6 million worth of digital artworks as NFT’s. She auctioned her WarNymph digital collection featuring a total of 10 artworks created in collaboration with her brother Mac Boucher on a platform named Nifty Gateway. – “This past year, grimes put a piece of her soul up for sale, and developed her ‘WarNymph’ avatar, a completely digital version of herself. “- Gateway. Some digital artworks in the WarNymph collection by Grimes were accompanied by exclusive music created by the artist herself: ‘earth’ features the unreleased Æryth, ‘mars’ has its own mars theme, and ‘death of the old’ carries a demo of anhedonia. The collection was divided into seven limited editions and two open editions – ‘earth’ and ‘mars’ which sold around 700 copies for USD $7,500 each.
An NFT is a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos. They are bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency, and they are generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos. They have been around since 2014 and are becoming increasingly popular. NFTs are also generally one of a kind, or at least one of a very limited run, and have unique identifying codes. NFT’s can be attached to anything from an MP3 to a single JPEG image, a tweet, or a video clip.
what are NFT’s used for
Artists no longer have to rely on galleries or auctions to sell their art. Instead, the artist can sell it directly to the consumer as an NFT, which also lets them keep more of the profits. Artists can program in royalties so they’ll receive a percentage of sales whenever their art is sold to a new owner. This is an attractive feature as artists generally do not receive future proceeds after their art is first sold.
A community of the future will celebrate diversity, equality and inclusion and propose a new digital world; a metaverse where everyone is equal regardless of class, race, gender and age. A digital ecosystem that transcends all virtual identities into a utopia for peace, prosperity and progress.
My outcome was successful when recreating Mederos work through photographs. Mederos is best recognized for his signature bubble-wrap style where he paints individual bubbles over portraits for added texture and effect. To create these images I placed bubble-wrap in front of the face to mimic Mederos where he creates texture and light reflecting off the bubble-wrap and distorts the image underneath. You can make out the image underneath by looking at the photograph from a distance. His images don’t necessarily have a meaning or send a message to attract viewers, its the large amount of detail and the unique technique to create his final image that draws attention.
What I like most about this image is the detail on the bubble-wrap that contrasts against the blurred background. The artificial light reflects off the bubble-wrap, like in Mederos’ paintings. The main focus of his artwork is the detail on the bubbles, the background is blurred so the main attention is how the camera focused and captured the detail on the bubble-wrap. I took this image with artificial lights and edited and adjusted the colour to look like his paintings. The repetition of bubbles could represent the continuous plastic use that is affecting our planet. The lack of emotion in the face shows most of us have no reaction to how negatively we’re effecting the earth and environment, yet it is right in front of their eyes and they still act unbothered.
Final edits inspired by distorted view
The creases in the plastic sheet affect the face like plastic affects the sea. At least 8 million tons of plastic end up in our oceans every year, and make up 80% of all marine debris. Marine species ingest or are entangled by plastic debris, which causes severe injuries and deaths. Litter dropped on the street doesn’t stay there. Rainwater and wind carries plastic waste into streams and rivers, and through drains into the ocean. This plastic that covers the lens of the camera has distorted the face and wont be seen how it originally was. The plastics in our seas affect the natural nature of our oceans and ruins its natural form.
I took this image with artificial lighting which reflects off the plastic sheet. The materials I used to create this image has blurred out any facial expressions on the face. This represents how many people don’t react or act upon the waste in our seas.
Conceptual realism is the theory that abstract universals, unobservable general classes or ideal types have a reality that is independent, equal and sometimes superior to the reality of their individual parts or specific examples.
The terminological distinction was made in order to stress the difference between the claim that universal mental acts correspond with universal intentional objects and the perspective that dismissed the existence of universals outside the mind.
Surrealism
Surrealism is the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images. Surrealism aimed to revolutionize human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life in favor of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams. The word ‘surrealist’ means ‘beyond reality’. Many surrealist artists used automatic drawing or writing to unlock ideas and images from their unconscious minds, and others sought to depict dream worlds or hidden psychological tensions.
Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”
Surrealism can be expressed through photo montage. Photo montage is often used as a means of expressing political dissent. It was first used as a technique by the dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. It was later adopted by the surrealists who exploited the possibilities photo montage offered by using free association to bring together widely disparate images, to reflect the workings of the unconscious mind.
Final images inspired by Bellissamo and surrealism
These images relate to surrealism in the way that they explore alternate worlds with hidden intentions. The message I aim to project through this image is how the thought of nature and how our actions affect the world around us has left our mind. We have put ourselves first and underappreciated the environment whilst doing things that benefit us and damaged the earth.
This picture represents how nature can fight back to how we affected the environment has humans. The way the branches crawl up the neck, strangling them as punishment.
The same with this image as the water falls down the neck, as if it was trying to drown the person in the photograph.
Another approach to these edits could be about the people who care and try to change the negative affects on the environment. This image shows a tree trunk instead of a head and brain. This represents how some people can be so focused on helping the planet and being vegan e.g., that it takes over their day-to-day life and they can become brainwashed.
This edit is inspired by Bellisimo’s collage between humans and nature. To involve the theme of Anthropocene, I edited this image with the reflection of a forest fire in the persons eyes, representing what they can see, compared and contrasted to what is in her mind. The green, healthy forest in her mind is a memory of what nature used to look like before deforestation. Forests still cover about 30% of the world’s land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 502,000 square miles of forest. We need trees for a variety of reasons, they absorb the carbon dioxide that we exhale, and the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit. As those gases enter the atmosphere, global warming increases, climate change. Anthropocene is man’s impact on the environment, this edit represents the large, negative impact we are having on earth.
To create this edit I made the image black and white, created layers with the forest images and cut and pasted where I wanted it to be. I took the portrait in the studio with artificial lighting to have a clear, sharp image. The face being in black and white indicates the lack of happy emotions, like the lack of bright colours. The colourless image represents the negative emotions created by what is seen.
Darian Mederos is a painter and visual artist who is known for his unique and different approach to painting. He is best recognized for his signature bubble-wrap style where he paints individual bubbles over portraits for added texture and effect. Mederos’ work focuses on the ubiquitous human face. Emotive and replete with meaning, our faces encompass the vast human experience, revealing everything at once or nothing at all.
When creating the “Obscura Series”, Mederos creates something new, a photorealistic abstraction. The bubble wrap reflects light and distorts the underlying image, it is only at a distance that the works come into focus.
Alexandra Bellissamo
The relationship between nature and mankind.
Alexandra Bellissimo makes artworks that focus on “making” pictures rather than simply “taking” pictures. To make her surreal images, she uses collage techniques in combination with her photographs. In doing so, she combines man with nature to create works infused with emotion and psychology.
Alexandra Bellissimo’s body of work extends beyond traditional photograph. Her imagery explores the physical and psychological relation between nature and humans when combined through the use of collage. Her collaging process involves cutting layering and adhering photographic prints together into a single image. Bellisimo’s collages evoke a sense of empathy, intimacy and harmony when humans and nature coexist.
Comparison
Alexandra Bellisimo
Darian Mederos
Bellisimo’s images are constructed through a combination of photographs and collage. Her outcomes are black and white, crisp and sharp images with a variety of grey scale tones. Her images are taken with artificial lighting in a studio which resulted in high detailed images. Her images have a range of tones from light to dark to create highlights and contrast. The absence of colour helps to bring out the definition of her images. The arrangement and layout of her images tend to be head-shots and portraits. I believe Bellisimo’s photographs have a deeper meaning than what is seen by the eye. Her photographs show the relationship between nature and humans, it could be nature taking over humans as punishment for how we treat the planet, for example.
Mederos paints his images, in the circles of the bubble wrap he paints large strokes, it is only when you step away that the whole images comes together to reveal what is underneath. His images are very warm with a mixture of light and dark tones. Mederos paints the light that reflects off the bubble wrap to create the effect that it has been photographed with artificial lighting.
The difference between these two artists is Bellisimo photographs and collages and Mederos paints large images with big brushes that when stepped away from has masses amount of detail. Bellisimo’s images have hidden messages and send a message about nature and the world around us, compared to Mederos who paints images with large detail that do not need a hidden message to engage the viewer, his interesting and abnormal technique is enough to attract the viewers eyes.
Anthropocene is the scale of human impact on earth, Anthropocene is sometimes used to simply describe the time during which humans have had a substantial impact on our planet. Geologists believe humans have become the single most defining force on the planet.
“the indelible marks left by humankind on the geological face of our planet”
Anthropocene photography focuses on displaying the effects of mankind on the Earth. Typically, Anthropocene photographers will produce images based on pollution and/or waste, the destruction of nature, and large man-made structures. This form of photography is heavily rooted in political views on climate change.
There is a project on Anthropocene, it is a multidisciplinary body of work combining fine art photography, film, virtual reality, augmented reality, and scientific research to investigate human influence on the state, dynamic, and future of the Earth.
The image on the right was taken by Ernest Baudoux at Plemont Bay in the 1870’s, the photograph on the left I took around 145 years later of the same cave. I edited the two images together in photoshop to compare the similarities and differences of the landscape.
