"works" so far

ok so here are a few of the things that i've made (none are hosted online so you have to download them) and short explanations. feedback please. they are arranged generally from most-based-in-intellectual-thought to i'm-going-to-do-this-because-it-seems-cool-and-see-if-it-means-anything-later.

HUMANA (open .gifs using firefox) (this is just the .gif since i haven't made the final web page yet)

Humana questions the perceived reality of Google Street View and its position at the vanguard of photographic mapping of our world’s streets. The piece contains a .GIF made from current (as of July, 2009) screenshots of the Old Humana Building in downtown Louisville, KY on Google Street View combined with videos posted on YouTube of its implosion in the summer of 2008. This juxtaposition transforms Google Street View from an accurate rendering of current civilization and an example of cutting edge technology to a tool for nostalgia – a last refuge for a structure whose destruction is well documented throughout the internet and whose absence can be seen “in person” in the actual physical location where it once stood.

PROBLEMS WITH “HOWL”

Problems With “Howl” attempts to isolate and emphasize the authoritative nature and perhaps anti-innovative tendency of Microsoft Word’s grammar- and spell-check functions. The piece is made of screenshots of the all ten pages of Allen Ginsburg’s poem “Howl” once it is copy/pasted into Microsoft Word in white font so that only the suggested grammar and spelling corrections are visible. This seminal work of the Beat generation becomes invisible, reduced to a series of red and green lines that draw attention to only the perceived problems with the work according to Word.

PIXELATED PAINTINGS (2 Kelly, 2 Close, 1 Monet, 1 Seurat)

This series uses photographs on the internet of famous works of modern art, reduced to low resolution, then screenshot, and blown back up. The chosen works all employ a similar color strategy to that of pixels on a computer screen, which are abstract forms of color when seen individually or up close but combine to create an image when seen from afar. Here is the best example: (see the original here)






















PIEDMONT CUT OUT

Piedmont Cut Out is a .GIF of screenshots from Google Maps Street View in Piedmont, Delaware that moves the viewer forward through a digitally recreated rural landscape while it loses its resolution, and subsequently the illusion of reality, with each passing frame until finally reduced to as simple and abstract a composition as is possible using Adobe Photoshop’s Cutout effect.

OREGON RAIN

Oregon Rain is a .GIF made with a series of sequential reduced-quality screenshots of Google Maps Street View on a highway on the Northern border of Oregon, a section of road apparently photographed by Google during a rainstorm.

THE SEVEN A’S

The Seven A’s is a .GIF made from seven blown up screenshots of the letter ‘a’ in an internet browser. When small sized black text on web pages is enlarged it often reveals itself to be made up of a multicolored grid of squares that only appear black when they are all the size of a single pixel. When I typed the letters “a a a a a a a a a a a a a a […]” into my Firefox search bar, took its screen shot, then enlarged it, a pattern emerged within the a’s. The first and third ‘a’ were made from the same combination of colored pixels, while the second, fourth, and sixth used a different set, and the fifth and seventh used a still different combination. After the seventh ‘a’ the pattern repeated: 1 2 1 2 3 2 3… The .GIF cycles through this pattern forever.

#000000
#000000 is an abstract composition made by randomly rearranging the 583 squares of color that made up the characters ‘#000000’ (the HTML code for the color black) when I took a screenshot of it on the internet and enlarged it. (this is not completed since it's very time consuming and maybe not worth doing but below is the image i'm taking the pixels from)






here are examples of the same process used on the letters 'a' and 'b' to show you what the final product will resemble:
















































LONGEST DRIVE IN THE CONTINENTAL US

Using Google Maps, I attempted to find the longest drive possible between two request-able "locations" in the lower forty-eight states using the most direct roads (in terms of estimated driving time according to Google Maps) without leaving the country. Please send me any longer routes that you find.

WHITE WATER

White Water is a .GIF made from a screen shot of an early version of the computer game The Oregon Trail. The spinning rectangle is an enlarged section of pixels meant to appear as foam in a low-resolution image of a river.