Project 1 - Cutting Line
Using Illustrator, I designed a graphic. Then, I chose a material and sent my design to the laseer cutter. I wanted to place a spotlight on the power of growth through change by creating something in a 2D environmnment and transforming it into a 3D object one can experience with one's senses by mending the 2D pieces together. The images below include the process of laser cutting, the initial print on a difficult material, and the finished product once assembled
Project 2 - Color as a Medium
Using Photoshop, I collaged different images of televisions and altered the various color channels and transparency levels of the images. I used different color modes (RGB vs CMYK) in the the work shown on screen versus the work I printed on the 2D large format printer, which are respectively shown in the images below. I aimed to highlight the importance of perspective in today's media, as we tend to often seek opinions of those online in which we already agree and forget to remember that the information we are being fed is specifically curated for our eyes using data-driven systems.
Project 3 - Steal This Book
Using Adobe InDesign, I created a Zine with bright and graphic collages mixed in with text. In creating my work, I attempted to place a large emphasis on the beauty of the human body in all shapes and sizes by implementing different artistic styles in the images I selecteed. Some pages had bold and simplistic images, while other pages contained more complex pastel-like images, and a different body part was highlighted on each spread.
Final Project
My work aims to mock the ubiquity of microtrends in today’s cultural and artistic landscape. I created three posters, one for each decade of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The posters are carefully crafted colleges of images often thought to represent the sociocultural trends in the given decade. However, upon closer glance, one will notice that I include images of objects in the collages that aesthetically match the poster but do not thematically represent the given decade. This choice was to emphasize the transcendence of trends throughout decades and the notion that society today constantly yearns for a renewed sense of novelty, explaining the phenomenon of trends that once lasted decades being cycled through thee spotlight at record speeds of only months. I placed the posters in an original magazine, each with a price and a caption, representing how people will pay any amount of money to seem ‘on trend’, although it is nearly impossible to keep up with trends today. The articles I paired with the posters are generated by ChatGPT, a language model that generates text when prompted. Using AI generated text is meant to symbolize the superficiality of society’s obsession with novelty. Insofar as novelty and uniqueness is our goal, we become robots enslaved to the next new microtrend.
