Wyatt Danger Brains

Preface

Senior Thesis Show 1 has launched and is currently on display in the Cress Gallery in the Fine Arts Center. This marks the culmination of my BFA experience at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. My piece, an exploration in the formation of meaning and the relation between image and text, is on display in the side gallery. Running from a hidden computer, it projects the contents of this page on a web browser onto a large canvas. It is accompanied by ambient music from SomaFM’s Drone Zone. The artist statement further covers what the project is about:

Artist Statement

Untitled
Stephen Bush
XHTML, CSS, Javascript
The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. – Sol Lewitt

In an attempt to explore the construction of meaning, images, text, and sound are combined, bereft of context. In and of themselves, each element is a container and messenger of its own accord. When the three conjoin, a new essence is offered to the viewer for interpretation. To allow for thorough investigation of this idea, live streams of images, text, and music are drawn from unconnected social media sources. Repeated observation of this process establishes a narrative; transient and unending.

Melding Art and Programming

The piece began as an attempt to examine the impact that each individual variable and consideration of design can have on information. I planned to create posters and books exploring every possible combination of a set of variables, such as font, font-weight, font-style, color, scale, image, and more. Realizing that this would be time consuming and would not teach me anything new, I decided to pursue writing a program to combine the elements for me. After exploring this idea for a while, I instead tapped into application programming interfaces (APIs) of established social media sites (Twitter and Flickr) with Javascript to provide the content to be randomly combined. All code involved will be covered in a later blog post, so get excited!

Presentation on Process

Before opening the gallery, all graphic design majors gave 5 minute Keynote presentations about our work. This served as an excellent opportunity to refine our public speaking skills and to clearly communicate our project concepts to the audience before our pieces had even been viewed. Slides will soon be posted to Slideshare, accompanied by another sweet blog post about the presentation. It was pretty much exciting and fantastic.

Outstanding Turnout

In advertising for this exhibition, our class turned not only to traditional means of fliers and postcards (which were beautifully designed by classmates), but also to social media. Utilizing Twitter & Facebook, I personally invited over 700 people to the opening. This was certainly the most packed house that the Cress Gallery has ever hosted, and I think the spectators came for more than just the free food!

In Closing

Thanks to all who came to support us. The work will be on display in the gallery for another week, so if you are in the area, I greatly encourage you to check it out! Also the second show opens April 10th, and promises to be just as great. The UTC Art Department produces some truly talented and motivated individuals, come be a part of the exciting UTC and Chattanooga Arts Community.

Photo By Jessi Taylor

Tags: 2009, Art, Art Department, awesome, college, Cress, Flickr, Graphic Design, Interactive, school, sol lewitt, Stephen Wyatt Bush, Thesis, twitter, UTC, wyattdanger

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 8:28 pm and is filed under BFA Thesis, Development, General, Graphic Design, Javascript, Senior Thesis, Social Media, UTC, Web, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.