Media Arts and Technology

Layers Project: Due by Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Concept due by Thursday

. 5 to 10 images
. Define a rule by which you will collect/select images (photographs found/or taken by you)
. Images can be: frames from a video, or still images
. Rule(s) creates the control
. Stack them in layers: result chance outcome
. Try many variations to explore different outcomes within the constraints of layers and your original rules
. You have to do this until you get to a point that you could not have imagined –
. You can use text, high contrast, abstract visual elements
. Go for visual complexity, don’t be afraid of ugly, transcend it to achieve some new aesthetic quality (or another way to say it: Aim for noisy but have coherence and elegance (may be hard at first

Grading:
. Effort: the more you do, the higher the grade
. Transcend your aesthetic: do something you would not normally do
. Image should have complexity, brake rules (report back what rules you have broken)

We looked at architects Herzog & De Meuron's DeYoung Museum in Golden gate Park today. See some testing of surfaces, materials, etc. at: http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/rsc/hm/index.html

I used a bank of about 12 different images - 7 are schematics of circuits I've made, and 5 are classic portraits I've drawn/painted. I thus made a piece focusing more on the schematics, another focusing on the portraits, and a final piece combining the two equally. Concepts centered around a clash between digital and analog mediums.

I used a total of 7 images in this project. My photographs were based off of light emitting objects, which I found difficult to work with in the layering process when I got to it. It was very challenging for me to come up with something that actually somewhat made sense, but I found that to be impossible in this case and very frustrating in that matter. This was certainly a chance-based outcome, and this is what I came up with.

For this project I used a group of 10 images consisting of various photographs from the great barrier reef. I chose 5 photos of the great barrier reef's coral and sea life and 5 photos from areas that are now dead coral or depleting.

In my first layers composition I focused on the pictures of thriving sea life and coral reef and did several different variations:
In the next images, I focused on the images of dying coral reef:

For my layer project, I used United States' presidents pictures. For all 44 portraits I applied different techniques to break my rules. As I made different variations on the layers, the whole project became distorted and was difficult to figure out what the image was.

In addition to the pictures of United States' presidents, I also did aerial view of UC campuses. There are total of ten UC campuses.

For this assignment I collected and combined eight aerial views of various zoos.
In the first image I adjusted the contrast and brightness of the images using levels and varied the opacities.
In the second image I changed the levels of the opacity on each of the layers and also varied the saturation of each layer.
In the third image I added noise and applied varying degrees of blurring and sharpening filters.

I used 10 images of splash in this project.And I built various layers so that the image could achieve different effects.I changed the light, contrast, blur and different layer types.

I took screenshots of Google Map's street views of every turn from my house to my high school.

I used 9 images of car crashes for my project. I used various layer blending options to achieve different effects, and eventually found desaturating the image to be appealing to me. I think fiddled with the curves, and brightness and contrast.

Here are the best results of my arranging of layers and changing styles. I used 12 pictures of different animal skulls that had the same basic composition of a head on a table. The results looked like weird still lifes. I layered them on top of eachother and changed the opacity, contrast and the different layer types photoshop offers (like color dodge, difference, hue, color burn, soft light, etc.)