Media Arts and Technology

This project is due January 27. It consists in creating an image that is made up of many other images blended together using layers in Photoshop and giving each layer a degree of transparency. When you blend 2 images together you want to set the transparency for the top image to 50% but if you were to blend 3 images, then the top image would be set at 25% and the middle one at 50%. additional images on top would then follow with 12%, 6%, 3%, 1%. Of course there are many ways to do this.

This is an aesthetically directed project. The layer you are adding should be lined up to the image beneath it based on some visual marker in the bottom image, for instance, line up according to a hand, or telephone, or, etc....Continue to stack on top of each other, be creative. The most unusual, complex, innovative image will set the standard for all the other images. See the examples given for lecture 1.20

I chose my subject matter to be based on different cities around the world. Some of the pictures focused just on the buildings while others had other images as well. For example one focused on cars driving down a bridge with a city in the background and others had the cities reflection in a lake. I changed the images size of each picture to be the same so that each layer would arranged over the other without the edges showing.
I decided to save my image as I added layers to show the progression. I thought this would be interesting to see at what point it is more aesthetically pleasing.
The first 20 so layers gave me this image. The next set contains about 28 images. The next set contains about 35 images. The final image contains about 40 images.

For this project, I used various pictures (mostly the "rejects") from self-portrait photo assignment in an Intro to Photography class I took. The pictures that I used were taken via self-timer, with multiple photos being shot in a row (similar to film stills, though I did not align them to illustrate that fact). I aligned the pictures randomly around the canvas, but grouped different body parts together. For instance, all the "leg" pictures appear in one location, all the "eyes" in another, and so on and so forth. What I began to notice was a grid effect happening, meaning that when the edges of the photographs overlapped, they created different sized rectangles. Aesthetically, I really enjoyed this. The pictures were also fairly light to begin with, but when i layered them, they began to almost white each other out. I loved the idea of disjointed, randomly aligned images of body parts began to simply blur together with layering, created a weird kind of misty appearance. So, with that, I went with the mist idea and loved that I began to make something that appeared almost ethereal. I loved that you could almost make something out, but not really; almost like looking through a thick fog.
The above image was my favorite one, although it does not have the most amount of layers.
The image below, is the "final" image (although not the one I personally liked the best), with the most layers, a total of 35: The following two images are just examples of a couple of my first images that evolved into the final ones:

I wanted to investigate what formal features would stand out after averaging multiple photographs of paintings. I was interested in using digital techniques to study a traditional medium and revealing connections between historical and current artworks.

I began with 20 photographs of French and American paintings I took at the National Gallery. These included landscape, still life and portrait paintings by artists including Gauguin, Corot, Vuillard, Hartley and Ryder. I chose 20 paintings with different subjects, but similar external features: landscape orientation, similar proportions, and frames visible in the photograph. I cropped them to be the same dimensions and lined the images up at the upper left corner for blending.

As an experiment, I also combined the same images using High Dynamic Range (HDR), to compare the results. I thought the first HDR image below was the most interesting.

For this assignment I took a collection of images, particularly, a collection of 43 National Geographic magazine cover images, and created a visual database that allows the viewer to see all of the covers at once. This composite image is an overlapping of all 43 cover images, all of which have a very low opacity, which leaves the viewer able to see every image ta once, but unable to make out any particular details of the image. This creates an image that is a representation of the 'average' National Geographic cover. You can make out the overwhelming form, tone, and composition that is typical of the covers, an you can still read the title text which indicates that this is a National Geographic cover.

This is the final result of all 43 images placed on top one another, with an opacity of 3% for each image. This means that the very bottom layers will be lost, but may still have an effect on the overall image. This image is a compilation of only the covers that had the face of a person or animal on it, I lined up the left eyes of all of the subjects, and set the opacity to 5% per image. This is an example of some of the magazine covers used, this is only some of them, 43 were used in total.

Caitlin Gowdey
ART 102 – January 25, 2010
Layers Project

For this project, I wanted to examine the history of robots in film, starting in the 20s, and going up into the 1990s, specifically 1996 with the age of Mystery Science Theater 3000, where – in my opinion- robots hit their peak of greatness. The order I layered them was at first, based on size of picture rather than chronological date, although after getting started, I started unconsciously grouping them into loose chronological layers. I started with Maria from Metropolis, eventually adding Ro-Man from Robot Monster, Tik Tok from Return to Oz, Jet Jaguar from Godzilla vs Megalon, Robby from Forbidden Planet, Chani from Devil Girl From Mars, Gog from Gog, Tobor from Tobor the Great, Robocop, The Terminator, Talos from Jason and the Argonauts, the Venutians from Target Earth, Moguera from The Mysterians, GORT from The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Robot from The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, the Killbots from Chopping Mall, Q from Houdini’s The Master Mystery, Mecha Godzilla, some Volkites from Undersea Kingdom, the particularly weird looking Iron Man from The Phantom Creeps, Golem from The Golem, the Mechanical Monsters from that Superman movie, a Neptune Man from Invasion of the Neptune Men, Torg from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Val, Aqua, Catskill and Phil from the Heartbeeps, the Daleks from Dr. Who, Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, Box from Logan’s Run, C-3P0 and R2-D2, one of the replicants (Pris) from Bladerunner, Lisa from Weird Science, Transformers, Nova S-A-I-N-T from Short Circuit, Data from Star Trek, and then finally Crow, Tom Servo and Gypsy from Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There are many different layering strategies going on, I tried putting them all in a clump on top of each other at first, but it wasn’t quite right aesthetically, so I ended up sectioning them off into little sub-groups. There is a section on the upper right where I grouped all the old movie posters of robots carrying women like damsels, either helplessly dangling or being saved, and lined up all the eyes of the dangling women, and they all lined up exactly. I’m pretty sure there was just “dangling woman” template they used for every poster ever. In the middle, there are larger, Terminator-like robots all on top of each other- underneath them is one of the original pictures of Maria from Metropolis in a chair surrounded by halos of electricity. And somehow the image of Maria disappeared in the opacity, but one of the halos managed to stay visible, and lined itself up poignantly over the head of a giant cylon.

Choosing robots in film, rather than robots in real life was a choice I made because film (especially science-fiction/fantasy film, where robots most often occur) is a place where we as humans allow our minds to project onto the screen creatures and beings that we’ve never seen or interacted with in reality. Outside of film, they live in the confines of books or dreams, but inside the film world, they are able to come to life and interact with our reality. Humans are constantly enamored with creating beings similar to ourselves, and yet capable of things we as humans could never accomplish. We are constantly building situations that force each other to question the prerequisites of “being alive”. And after finishing this project and re-reading the James Elkins sections on formlessness, connections between robots and the informe began to emerge out of the mist of my brain that I had never thought about before, because robots come in so many versions, to me, they embody the idea of formlessness in its purest sense. They have no original form or structure, they have no requirements, their construct is continuously evolving and devolving in a perfect example of surrealist thought. They are dreamt up, the imagination runs wild with metallic welding brushes, they are, and then they’re gone in cinematic history, only to be replaced by an equally random and senseless manifestation of the human subconscious, forever feared and adored.

This is the redone version of this project.

For my subject matter, I used images from a photography project that I completed last quarter. For that project, I emailed 35 of my friends and asked them to take a picture of their surroundings using the webcams on their computers. It wasn't mandatory that they were in the frame, but I'd say about half of them were. The type of image that I've produced for this project is a kind of composite of all of my friends/ their worlds merged into one space.
In this image, I simply merged all 35 images together using HDR. I didn't adjust any of the levels or color balance. I think it's the most fascinating images of the 3, partly because of the fact that the software did all the work and the only choice I made was to merge the images.
For this image, I layered the images at random. I only adjusted the histogram and the contrast to make some of the elements pop out a little bit more. Still, a lot of the visual information gets lost in a jumble.
In this image, I grouped the batch of images into subgroups based on formal criteria. Some of the subgroups included unobscured faces, rectangular shapes, circular shapes, and irregular forms. After lining up the corresponding elements within the subgroups, I merged them together. From there, I merged these combined images into one final image, again trying to line up elements that corresponded with one another. After obtaining one image, I did not adjust any levels or colors.

Kyle Gordon

Originally my final image did not fulfill the goals of the project, so I redid it, using comic books as my theme. I collected 35 different comic book covers and combined them using overlay and adjusting each of their opacities ranging from 5-40%. The product of this was an image with little recognizable subject matter and an interesting image. To mess around even further, I tried combining all my images into an HDR image in 16 bit, the result being this.

For this project I decided to work with a series of images I took on my SLR for a stop motion animation short I created last year. I chose a series of 13 images capturing a skateboarder riding by. I set the bottom images to 90% and then minimized the opacity of the layers on top of it by varying degrees depending on the attraction I had to the articular image layer, increasing opacity (but never more than a previous layer) if I found the image more visually stimulating and decreasing the opacity if I was less interested in that particular image being shown. I this the final image has a convoluted suggestion of motion. Since I moved the layers around out of their original sequential order, I believe the effect suggests motion, but out of order.

I've always been intrigued by the shapes and patterns that are seen by overlapping sheets of perforated metal. For this project, I wanted to explore the outcome of assigning sets of rules to layer number, dot amount/size, and dot alignment. For the main piece I am presenting, I took one image of a perforated sheet blueprint and enlarged in with each layer. For the second layer, I aligned the center of a dot in the center row with the center of the first dot in the center row of the first layer. For the third layer, I aligned a dot with the second dot of the second layer. Fourth layer, alignment on the third dot of the third layer. And so on, until I got to alignment on the last dot (which means the last layer must consist of the same amount of dots as its layer number). Also, as the layers ascend, the amount of dots on each layer descends, which also means the dots get progressively bigger.

I call this "Twelve".
It doesn't follow the rule exactly, but it helped inspire the rule. It consists of 12 layers. These are images made earlier, exploring different rules of sizing and alignment. This image was made after, following the previously explained rule more strictly. And then I played around. I still plan on explore this idea more, generalizing and then varying the rules.

Emily Joy Rabinowitz