Playing Around

As I'm off uni ill at home at the moment I haven't been able to do much drawing/painting etc. I've been really bored so thought I'd just have a play around online at pixlr.com which is a photo editor a bit like Photoshop. In my research I've been looking at colour data so thought I'd experiment at how I could introduce this with the barcode theme I have thought about. 

I chose a black & white barcode image off Google as well as an image of a rose. I then used colour picker to select colours out of the rose petals and tried to represent these through the vertical strips of the barcode. I did the same for leaves of the rose into the coded numbers.

It's too early for me to say weather i'll start fully focusing on this idea alone but it's definitely something I'd like to revisit perhaps using my own photographs etc further down the line as colour data is something that interests me. 

Barcodes

So I've decided to start collecting barcodes, it suddenly hit me that they are literally everywhere on everything from magazines and books, food packaging, medication packaging, cosmetic packaging..you get the idea! Barcodes are an optical machine readable representation of data relating to the object to which it is attached and are made up of various vertical lines with a number code below. This may have potential.

                   

Further Data Research

'Diamond Jubilee Bunting Infographic' by Jam

I came across this bunting online at spreadingjam.com and thought it was a fun and quirky way of representing data visualization. Jam says their inspiration came from all the 'naff' jubilee trinkets that were on the market. The bunting features a jubilee celebration heat map and a break down of the various jubilee memorabilia there is out there. This again has opened my eyes to another possibility of how you can represent data. 

Data Research

I have begun to research into artists who use data in interesting ways. Here below are a few that caught my eye. 

                      'Meshu' by Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx

Meshu is a data location project with a difference, the designers idea allows you to select and enter locations on a map or use check ins from foursquare to create your own unique pieces of jewelry - necklaces,earrings,cuff links. It represents where you are, where you've been and where you are going in a data form which is not only personal but wearable. Materials used are acrylic, wood, nylon, and silver. 

'Ten artists, Ten years' by Arthur Buxton & Derek Ruths, 2012

This is data art of 10 famous artists such as Monet and Matisse and their paintings in pie chart form.The color distribution of each pie represents the five most used shades in each painting. I love the way such classics have been given a contemporary edge through the use of data to create a completely different interpretation of the paintings.   

'Stem' by Diana Lange 

Again this is colour data in such an interesting and unusual form. Diana Lange builds stems from colour processing through a processing application she has created that searches for images on Flickr which then creates beautiful eye catching compositions based on the colour data of the image. 

She says:

 'This little program looks for photos on flickr by a given search word. Afterwards, the colors of the photos are analyzed. The color itself gets detected and how often each color is found. This data is the foundation of every stem. Each segment represents one color of the photo, the diameter shows the quantity. The cell resolution in all segments is based on the brightness of the color.'

New unit: Sampling

I'm excited to be starting the unit as I didn't do as well as I hoped in the last, 'origins'. For this unit i'm in fashion which is a textile world I've really been looking forward to giving a try. 
When I found out our project brief was 'data', my initial reaction was how it was such a broad theme which is good but can also be quite daunting. The first things that came to mind was graphs and tables, stereotypical   things you'd relate to data. However it wasn't until our first afternoon session in the studio when Nigel showed us a beautiful part of a tree that had been cut to expose it's hundreds of years of rings, that it became clear that data could quite literally be anything. 

We had 30 minutes using our opposite drawing hand (my left), a piece of A1 paper and a sharp pencil to draw the 200 rings of a tree trunk - 3mm spacing between the lines. I absolutely loved the outcome of this task as it created such beautiful unexpected lines that wobbled in places making it look really organic. I managed to reach 79 rings.