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Module 1 - Warmup Exercise

Digital Reproduction

tl;dr: Create a digital homage to a 20th century artist/artwork. Explore a work of contemporary art (non-digital, non-screen based) and digitally re-create it in under 2 hours.

Due Date: Tuesday, Sept 6, 9am (see full timeline)

Submit to Gallery Pool: Digital Reproduction

• Brief and goals
• Learning Objectives
• Process
• Deliverables
• Considerations and Constraints
• Approaches, Inspiration and Context
• Documentation

The mere exposure to master works does not suffice. Too many persons visit museums and collect picture books without gaining access to art. The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened. This is best accomplished by handling pencils, brushes, chisels and perhaps cameras. - Rudolph Arnheim

Brief and Goals

In this module, you’re not only going to get to experience artworks, but explore how they are composed and constructed. In this exercise you’re going to unpack style and aesthetic by recreating a well-known artwork.

Brief: Explore a work of contemporary art (non-digital, non-screen based) and re-create it digitally in under two hours.

You’ll do this by building on your research from the looking out exercise. Select one of the works from your research. Before you begin, make sure you have a solid understanding of the compositional techniques used by the artist. You may need to refresh your memory or go deeper in your research! Then, translate the artwork from it’s analog medium into a digital form.

You have license to interpret the artwork and choose how you recreate it. It doesn’t have to be an exact reproduction. For example you could choose to animate it, break it into its components, create abstractation or simplifications of it, or recreate your experience of it rather than the work itself.

When you’ve finished the composition, compare the two side-by-side. Reflect on the outcome. Are the the same? Why? What did you learn by experimenting with this artists signature style? Has your understanding of how modern art is composed or received changed? Think about the differences between the analog and digital mediums? How does electronic media relate to traditional forms? What are the affordances of both for composing artwork?

Learning Objectives

As part of this exercise you will be asked to:

• Develop your skills in critical response to well-regarded works of art;
• Develop keener awareness of the experience evoked by contemporary art; and
• Develop your skills in abstraction, rather than representation, by using this awareness as a resource for critical media making and expressing this experience through media.

Process

• Revisit one of the works of art you documented as part of this week’s looking out exercise
• In not more than two hours, recreate this artwork in the style of the artist but in a digital medium i.e. represent the artist, their themes, their style and their compositional techniques, as well as your source material; (hint: you’ll need to plan carefully for your outcome to be successful!)
• Reflect on the process of recreating this composition and the affordances of digital versus traditional composition.

Deliverables

You are asked to deliver three things for this warm up exercise:

1. Composition: The final digital composition created.
2. Narrative: A description of the manner in which you approached the project, the process you followed and the strategies you used to translate the work
3. Reflection: A reflection on outcome and comparision to the original work.

Considerations and Constraints

Constraints:

• The outcome must be created in under 2 hour (not including research).
• You must work digitally.

Considerations:

• You are free to use any tool you wish to make your composition (Photoshop, Keynote, Powerpoint, an app, etc.)
• Think carefully about the artist, their methods and their process.
• Explore the artist’s visual style, techniques, composition and visual arrangements they use. Consider how composition, color, geometry, position, shapes, spaces, foreground & background relationships etc., enhance the overall effect of each painting. Consider how and why they’ve arranged the elements and objects the way they have?
• It doesn’t have to be an exact reproduction. You have creative license (see [approaches] below)

Approaches, Inspiration and Context

As mentioned, it doesn’t have to be an exact reproduction. For example you could choose to animate it, break it into its components, create abstractation or simplifications of it, or recreate your experience of it rather than the work itself.

Some of the kinds of things you might create could include, but are not limited to:

Reproduction

Try and reproduce the artwork exactly as you see it. Copy the details piece for piece into a digital composition.

In the style of

An approach is to leverage the style but not the subjects or content of the original work. Tools like JacksonPollock.org let you emulate the recognizable styles and traits of contemporary artists. This website lets you create Jackson Pollock style paintings online. Photobooth has pop art filters built in, and Photoshop has ‘pointillism’ effects available too.

Reinterpretation/Abstraction

Instead of trying to create the composition itself, try to evoke the ‘feeling’ or experience of the artwork. Explore how it felt to you and create a composition that describes your first impressions.

Deconstruct/Reconstruct

Gestalt theory suggests to fully understand a work of art we must first break down it down into it’s constitutent elements, and understand each of them to build a picture of the ‘unified whole’ In this regard, a group of CMU students broke apart a Kandinsky painting (“Decisive Pink”) making each of them interactive and animated withina a game environment.

Similarly you could break apart the pieces of the composition, examine and arrange the pieces individually. Or make them interactive/animated.

Recontectualize

b3ta issued a game-art challenge to it’s community on “turn famous works of art into video games, or classic video games into art. Space invade Mona Lisa and hang Mario in the Louvre.” One great example was a GIF that reimagined Mondrian’s famous paintings as a game of pong.

Documentation:

A suggested format for documentation is as follows. You should include a write up of the following:

• Artist - Describe the artist you have been assigned and in particular their style, themes that they deal with in their work, their contributions, etc.
• Work - Describe the work you selected and why? How is it composed (color, tone, form, shape, space, line, surface, proposition, context, symbolism, response, etc.)
• Approach - How did you approach the assignment and re-creation of the work in a digital medium?
• Product - what did you create, how, etc.?
• Reflection - Do you think you captured the themes and style of the work accurately? what did you learn? what would you do differently?

Each of these sections should be no more than 150-200 words max. and well illustrated (images, videos, etc.)

For the Project Info’s goal description: it must be tweetable - summarise your outcome in no more than 140 characters