Art and Technology | Taylor Whitesel

This was a really fun and interesting assignment. I never thought that I would do anything like this with my major and I learned a lot from it. Our group decided to have me dress up as a sick/injured man and have themselves dress up as nurses assisting me. We then walked around downtown Tampa to see people's reactions. Surprisingly, the majority of people that we passed had little to no reaction to me. For the most part they were either on their phones or didn't want to take time out of their day to get involved. It really shows a lot about the society that we live in and I am glad that I got to do this cool experiment.

I really had fun with this blog assignment because I love music. Music means so much to me. The idea of portraying a story or idea in such a unique way is so interesting to me. Now, don't get me wrong, there are definitely some genres that I like more than others. Probably my favorite genre is rock though. I am a huge fan of the alternative scene. From classic to grunge to punk to post-hardcore to indie to even emo, I love everything that the rock genre has to offer. I also have a soft side for techno/electronic. There were a few years in highschool that I listened to nothing to artists like Tiesto, Basshunter, and Scooter. Electronic was even the genre that turned me onto rock. Eventhough I'm not a huge fan of Electronic and all of its sub genres that much any more, they still bring back great nostalgia and are always fun to listen to once and a while. Out of all of the movements we were allowed to choose from for this assignment, I definitely picked artists that fell into the

   This one took me forever to come up with an idea for. Everything I tried to put together never turned out to be really original or interesting to look at. Nothing came to mind, until my roomates and I watched the second season of Stranger Things. The main antagonist is this huge shadow monster with tentacles that lives inside and possesses the main character. I really liked the way the monstor was designed, so I decided to use it as inspiration.     I xeroxed my feet, hands, and face and then used all of them to make a shadow-monster-esc figure coming out of my head. I think it turned out pretty decently. For art movements, it definitely has some DADA  and surrealism influences. The message I tried to persuade the idea that the mind is an intricate thing and it wonders in a multitude of places when we sleep. Here is the picture from Stranger Things  that I used as inspiration

I don't think I have ever spent so long on a project before. When professor Roundtree told us that it was time for us to really put work into some of these projects, I took that to heart and really spent time on this one. The assignment was to make a grid art of a piece of artwork. I decided to do one of my favorite albums and definitely my favorite album cover of all time. The album is called Deja Entendu by an indie band, Brand New. The album means so much to me and has really changed how I look at things. Here is the original picture that I used: And here is my version of it: I used a 12x16 canvas and then used transfer paper to trace the image on to the canvas with pencil. I then took little Styrofoam beads and glued them on one at a time.

   ASCII or  American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a type of character encoding system that is seen on computer platforms. It is a type of art that creates pictures completely out of text and characters that are available on a computer. The main reason why ASCII was developed was because at the time, computers didn't have the graphic capabilities to create detailed pictures.        With the rise of the internet and technological advances with computers, ASCII became very popular among users. One individual by the name of Christopher Johnson was known for his ASCII art designs that range from present day all the way back in 1994 when the internet was just getting started. He has a website (chris.com) that displays all of his ASCII art designs. People also used ASCII around this time for a game called "Multi-User Dungeon" which was a multiplayer roleplay game that was completely textual. ASCII art is still used today, usually on comment pages or forums.

For this assignment we had to look at a 21st century technology and talk about what influenced its creation and what future inventions could possibly be influenced off of it. I did the LCD overhead projector which is seen in almost every class and office now a days. However, It wasn't an original idea at all. It had a lot of previous influences that made it what it is today. Here is my paper on it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 21 st Century Technology: The LCD Overhead Projector  There are a multitude of incredibly useful 21 st century technologies that we as society use every day. Almost every one of these technologies are mostly just ideas that were influenced by previous technologies. One great example of this that popped in my head as soon as I heard about this assignment is the LCD Overhead Projector.             These have become a pretty common appliance in cl