July Final Friday Exhibition

Hi All-- We will be exhibiting work at the

Donut Whole
1720 E. Douglas, Wichita KS.

Show will open Friday 7/30 @ 7pm.

We will install work Thursday 7/29 @ 2pm.

more info about Donut Whole can be found @
http://www.wichitavortex.com/donutwhole/

Last Project

These images are composed of all the 6 x 6 and 6 x 4.5 negatives I shot last semester in Black and White Studio. They were scanned and then stacked into multiple layers in a single Photoshop file with the opacity of each layer set at anywhere from 5 to 15 percent. A color filled layer was then added to the bottom of the stack. The green image is composed of the negative images reversed into "positive" form while the red/violet image is made up of the negatives without reversal. I added a quote from the T.S. Eliot poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to the green image. I have always found Eliot's poetry to be sort of dreamy and swimmy (for lack of better terms) as well as a creepy. I thought the quote fit the piece. I feel the green image is more successful than the other, as the negative images produce a much less coherent effect.

Splash Susie and MGMT Concert Jun 2010 videos

Splash Susie Video:
Where do I begin..... Well I love swimming and having fun with my son which he and I like to swim and ride bikes and such, so for me the video represents the bond between my son and I, just enjoying each-others company on a hot summer afternoon. The idea of splashing is me relating back to my childhood and just having a child like sense of adventure. The owl on my foot is also special to me, because it is one that I created myself so the meaning becomes much deeper. I wanted to play with motion and sound because I find it real interesting. The movement of your feet in water is fascinating to me so this video became vividly about my feet. A different way of looking at an image and altering it.

-Susie McHugh





MGMT Concert Jun 2010
This video is about my trip that I took with my boyfriend and good friend Zach. We all share a passion for MGMT and when we heard they were playing in KC,MO we were like " man we got to go see them"! So the video portrays a time line of our experience we had at the concert before while and after. It clips all the important aspects of our trip. I wanted it to be short but great and I really wanted it to include all the different songs MGMT played and my friends having a good time. Which we ended up having a blast so it was well worth it to do this project. And I have always wanted to do a video of a concert I went to because concerts are suppose to be fun and your suppose to get crazy and let loose. So I love the fact that I was able to do this! It was hard but well worth the frustrations. Thank you Lisa for being so open to me doing this video, you rock!

-Susie McHugh

Corporate Heartbeat

Untitled from Chris Yates on Vimeo.

Fifa has imposed a 2 diameter boundary around all the soccer stadiums in South Africa. All of the locals haven't been able to enter these areas and sell local products and cuisine. Many of the people visiting have also complained that they aren't being allowed to see the real South Africa. In this project i made a map of all of the stadiums in the United States and animated them to a rhythm of a heartbeat. This was to show that these corporations have taken ahold of the system that we know and continue to grow.

My Map

My final project this is my human head map I wanted to incorporate human veins and the human system as a map. How the body is set up as a map of information. I used different maps to create this land and water. Just a playful map show relationships of information

Life

We all have to deal with the hardships the challenges that life offers. The concept behind this image is to illustrated the chaotic, the confusions that humans face during the courses of their life. The explosions of the colors in this image represents the chaotic world that we are living in. The faces of the people represent the different responsibilities that we all have in common. The texts help to convey the message a little more clearly, but it's all depend on the viewers' own interpretation.

Emotions

The concept behind this image is to show the different emotions that a person has through the courses of the day. As human being we show thousands of expressions and emotions each day, and they're all different. sad, angry, bored, happy, stress, surprise, ect...

data and information technologies

untitled #6

This is another piece dealing with using data or information as art. This image is an amalgamation of landscape images from the web. Using the top 40 results of a Google search for landscapes, I layered the images and reduced the opacity to blend them together. The resulting image has a sort of texture to it that reminds me of an impressionist landscape painting.

Trent Munsinger Uniscape #1 & #2

#1 Natural

#2 Man-Made

These two joint pieces are the result of the collection, arrangement, and manipulation of photographs taken close-up to focus on the texture of the objects. I chose natural and man-made objects and experimented with different angles and repetitive elements especially on number 2.
I applied each layer simultaneously and carefully manipulated the opacity of each texture to blend all the images into a composite "Super Texture". I allowed layers to be of very little visibility while other layers required more dominance in the picture. I then altered levels such as exposure, saturation, colors, highlights and shadows in an effort to the make the composite look more believable and unified. I believe I achieved this in a solid composition and balance. It was very interesting and exciting to see the end result and to develop comparisons between the organic and industrial textures. Notice how each layer seems to dive out at you yet convincingly fall back into the image as a whole without distracting contrasts. The paint spot (or possibly bird excrement) was allowed to illustrate humanity's own lucrative and futile ambitions on the world it constructs. Both works contain their own sense of beauty and character but the point is which appeals to you more?

Object in Foreign Environment

I'm lucky enough to escape from the city and head our to our family farms in western kansas. Out there we get minimal cell phone reception and escape to a new place that is almost forgotten about. Being able to leave behind the constant urge to connect with the outside world and being able to be reached at all time is one thing that draws me to this place more often.

Self Portrait

Spending countless hours pushing type around and drinking way to much coffee, i find myself always in a daze in kind of an out of body experience. i work all in my head and once i start fall into a trance for hours upon times. This portrait is crossing the boundary between the person that i am and the designer i become every time i sit in front of a computer to work on a project. Fading back and forth in consciousness and design i tried incorporating both aspects into a visual form.

data and information technologies

untitled #5

This piece deals with the presentation of information or data as art. To accomplish this, I used the Facebook profile pictures of my friends. I layered them in Photoshop, in alphabetical order, and reduced the opacity of each image down to 5% to allow the images to blend into one another. Finally, I added a vignette around the center of the image and reduced the saturation around the edges, allowing the more colorful center to stand out.

digital video project

making/unmaking

The intent behind the video is to illustrate the ultimate futility of building: everything that gets built will eventually be taken apart. It may be undone by man, or by nature, but it always gets taken apart in the end.

object in a foreign environment

untitled #4

The objective of this piece was to take an object and place it in a different context, changing its meaning. Here, a statue of Baphomet was placed on an altar in a cathedral. The pope, and the other priests, appear to be kneeling before it in prayer. The juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane is not a new concept in art, but it is a concept that interests me and I wanted to play around with that in this piece. The statue originally had a very cool tone to it, and I tried to make it appear native to the scene by applying some of the warmer tones from the cathedral. The shadows that I applied on the altar from the statue need a lot of work. The comment was made during critique that the image could use some blood, and I have to say I agree with that.

digital self-portrait

untitled #3

The purpose of this project was to look at non-traditional ways of presenting a human portrait. In this piece, I manipulated a photograph of myself and inserted it into a scene from "Fraggle Rock", a show that I enjoyed from my childhood. I tried to create the impression of a bust carved from the stone of that cave by the Dozers that live there. They are still in the process of completing the sculpture, with their equipment out and their scaffolding still present. I like the way that the cave formations frame the portrait. And, I like that the portrait begs the question, "Why are they carving the bust of a human?" Perhaps one of them ventured outside of their cave and encountered a person, and believed that this was their creator. In that case, the bust takes on a different meaning, becoming a type of religious iconography. I take a certain perverse joy in entertaining the idea that the Dozers might think I am their god. But will I be the angry, vengeful god of the Old Testament, or the forgiving, loving god of the New Testament? For the Dozers sake, let's hope it's the latter.

digital landscape

untitled #2

This piece was created as the second of two digital landscapes. It is a collage created from a crumpled pair of blue jeans, a snail shell, and a fleece blanket. The jeans make up the foreground and create the illusion of a mountain range. The snail shell was used to take the place of a rising sun. Finally, a close up photo of a fleece blanket was manipulated to resemble clouds against the sky at sunrise. I added a subtle blur effect to mute some of the edges, and then I applied a halftone filter to grey out some of the shadows and tone down some of the highlights. It is probably best viewed from about 10 feet away, which allows the halftone pattern to become more discrete. From this distance, the print almost takes on the appearance of a painting.

The Chase

It may just look like a video of 2 people running on the treadmill. But the idea behind this video is to show a person's being stalked and chased down. However the stalker started to slow down because the other person was running too fast and near the end, he just slowed down and gave up.

Roxana W video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWxcrQaLog8

Habitat Time Lapse

Habitat Time Lapse from Chris Yates on Vimeo.

This is a rough cut together of some of the time lapse videos we have shot over the last week. Habitat for Humanity is building 7 houses in 8 days and we are documenting the build through video time lapse and regular video and using the footage to create promotional pieces for Habitat to use in recruiting future volunteers, organizations and families. We are still shooting so this is still a work in progress.

Digital Studio Project Four from Matthew Walker on Vimeo.

In this short video I wanted to see if I could change the manner in which time is perceived by modifying and changing the sound and saturation of certain portions of it, particularly portions which I felt to be the most important. I was also interested in the manner in which the mind recalls things and how the memories of portions of an event can be much more realistic or intense than other parts of it.

The Reason I chose to do the image of one of my best friends is, because it was such a pivotal moment with lots of hilarity to it! Like for instance when i told my friend to get in the shopping cart she was so hesitant to do it. However I tend to be kinda "pushy" peer pressuring her to get in the cart. So she did and as I turned my back she yelled my name"Susie", "Susie" as I looked over at her she started falling. I didn't catch her so she fell into a yellow bush and killed a part of it. She had scratches and was bleeding it was pretty hilarious. Anyhow as we were laughing hysterically these old ladies walked by and could CLEARLY see that we were having some issues but they just kept walking. Funny how old people are supposedly suppose to be all great and all. But even though we were sweating and thirsty I managed to free Jana from the cart! I felt like a superstar! Then I took some photo's, it was a great walk. So in my attempt to follow our assignment I found this photo to be great with fruit of the loom little fairy characters dancing on the cart. Along with the color scheme and angel of each fruit character. All in all it is meant to be funny and it has a great story behind it.

-Susie McHugh

Project 3

I was aiming at a surrealist vibe with this project. I intentionally tried to make the "feel" of the picture as matter of fact as possible. I toyed with making the image black and white, adding a sepia filter and a vignette. These made the image all the more creepy but felt over the top. I like the "normal" sense of this image (other than the gas mask and the giraffe's head, of course).

Project 2

With this assignment, I wanted to see how little information from a picture I could use and still have it "cohere." I chopped out 50 or so pieces of the original picture and placed them in a new file. Each "tile" was placed in its own Photoshop layer and the brightness, saturation, color balance, etc. was adjusted in order to make the pieces each a little different in value. Yes, it's a nun on a motorcycle.

Self Portrait

Trent Munsinger Project 2 Digital Portrait and Foreign Object

The Thought of a Memory

Prey (Version 1)

Prey (Version 2)

Thoughts on a Memory was the result of experimentation with pixelation and opacity. I wanted a clear emphasis on the unfocused and seemingly dreaming or disappearing. The trees were chosen to connect a time line or progression with the images of memory and how we necessitate the forgetting of this information as much as it is imperative to hold on to our fleeting images.

The two versions of Prey were a knock at the social trend of describing older available woman in a bar or club scene as a "Cougar". This affiliation to the powerful and cunning cat eludes to their experienced and intentional motives towards younger men whom have been paralleled with the indiffident and sometimes naive traits of a "Dog". What I was trying to create was scenes of tension where the viewer might be compelled enough to actually observe the space until amusement can be drawn from the out-of-place feline. The viewer might focus on the piece as a whole at first, referring thier thought to experiences with a similar dominant background, then if version one wasn't enough to trigger further inspection, version 2 directs the viewers attention from the background completely and attaches it the young dog, if the observant viewer knows the title they might begin to question why the puppy is associated as a predatory target. Who would do such a thing!?!

Picture Out of Place

Fun in the Sun
This is me kicking the ball around having fun. Just wanted to create different action poses and show motion. Wanted a busy foreground and a natural setting for the background. Its a comical and playful setting.

self portrait

My favorite flower is the rose. The concept of this image is to show the similarity between a woman and a rose. Roses are pretty but dark because of all the thorns they have on their stems. Women may seen and look delicate but there are so many more about them than just the outlooks.

my portrait

Self Portrait
This is me and my best friend and the changes were about to face, and the feelings of doubt and emotions that come along with it. How even though we see ourselves how we want we our blinded about our friends life. How one day life will be back to good again.

Trent Munsinger Self Portrait

30 Minute Photobooth to Illustrator Self-Portrait

Underwater city

There are 2 concepts behind this image. The first one is to tell a possible future of the end of the world when cities sunk under water. The second concept is that sharks hunting has become one of the most common hobbies now a day. Almost all the sharks in the world have nearly come to extinction. The image of the shark lurking around the city almost like a predator is so they could take revenge on what the human had done to their race over a long period of time.

My landscape

This is my landscape this is multiple photographs that I had taken around Wichita Ks it's my own kind of fantasy world. I always liked the idea of roads in the sky and just a above ground city. There is still work to be done it, but all update it as the class goes. Like the nature and city feel in the piece.

Susie McHugh

I chose to do my digital landscape on different photos I had taken around my house. I was going for different textures and patterns trying to get a real industrial chaotic look. I had a vision of a city landscape with buildings and pure chaos in the background of the image. I layered it in a way to help the viewer not only see what the foreground looked like but also the middle ground and so on. Thus this is the finished look to my creative process.

my landscape

This is just a rough copy still needs work but this landscape just a fantasy really I went to Dallas saw the highways they looked like they went up into the sky so I included it in my landscape. Its raining just had fun with this.

"Blending In"

The meaning behind this landscape is to tell a story of how people try to adapt or blend in when they were exposed to a new different environments.

digital landscape

untitled #1

This piece addresses the re-contextualization of military imagery into an American urban landscape. In this scenario, we see a quiet neighborhood street being dominated by tanks and advancing soldiers, while squadrons of fighter jets soar overhead. While this scene would not be out of place in modern day Iraq or Afghanistan, it is an unfamiliar and disturbing sight in the context of a peaceful College Hill street. The tanks and foot soldiers confront the viewer in the foreground, while at the left side of the image a son consoles his mother. The background has intentionally been left undisturbed and free from destruction. This, together with the position and direction of the advancing army, and the two grieving bystanders, is intended to create the impression that the real horrors exist behind the viewer, out of sight but not out of mind: a city under siege, and a population under martial law.

"Watching over"

This is a conceptual landscape. The meaning behind this image is to show that you always have some one, almost like a guardian angel watching over and protecting you most of the time.

Landscape

In this landscape image, I wanted to show the visual interpretation of the different cities in Italy. Having just returned from there i was constantly trying to surround my head with what i saw and trying to interpret everything i saw as a designer. The most important detail that i tok away was the scale and detail of every aspect of their landscapes. Having a 7 century old city being inhabited by modern living and reusing old buildings for newer ideas, the levels of details from the old and new cultures stood side by side. Looking deeper into objects and details showed the different layers of lifestyles that their culture embodies.

Trent Munsinger Project 1

"Welcome to the Family"

Conceptual Landscape

"Insurgence Somewhere"
Visual Landscape

"Sir McCartney for Change"

Celebrity Portrait

Trent Munsinger
My first attempts at Photoshop, Found it to be infectiously involving and amusing.

My first picture tries to pull huge context out of small objects to create almost a dark family photo of the possibly radioactive, rotting, artificially colored strawberries which at the same time retain a sweet and safe Gum Drop appearance until further observation. The metal cage in the back ground is actually from a large guitar amplifier I own that i took the photo of for its texture and, to my surprise, spider web. The landscape itself that i was trying to create can be connected with some form of candyland mountains but I wanted to strive for something stronger in content. I wanted the caged pose and ragged aesthetics to push towards ideas of prison systems and even as far as family predispositions to deviant behavior. Parralleling the saying, "You don't go to prison to ripen, you go to rot. "
With the second piece I was pushing for a more purely visual landscape where the texture of the streched exposure of the film would create a new mass out of the context of actual shape of the photographed patio creating an otherworldly experience. The streched strings of light also inserted exciting organic elements of growing or ascending into a some foreign event. I added the two planets, Jupiter and the Earth, just to see if i could make it believable and to help bring the viewers perspective to an upward gaze just as the picture was taken. I intended to pull the viewer from reality to infinity and back.

Finally, with the last piece I decided to fill out the rest of my week with a celebrity portrait of the renown musician Sir Paul McCartney, I wanted to play tribute to one of my favorite aspects about him and the Beatles which was thier humor. This being the reason I chose that particular image of Paul smiling brightly behind his own public scrutiny, most likely a church's button campaign against them, i wanted the filters to give Paul the "Obama Design" but make it a more epic rock and roll fantasy. The splotches are actually masked tree silouettes that I used the burn tool to vary the values.

Assignment One

Here are the three images I came up with, composites of a landscape pirated from the internet and pictures I took of three sculptures around the WSU campus.

I was aiming mostly for a "feel" with these and also seeing if I could duplicate with Photoshop something similar to an old wet plate photo. I wanted something vaguely gothic and creepy as an end product. Judging from some of the comments during Friday's critique, I think I was able to do that--though, hindsight being 20/20 I see a bunch a stuff I want to change and do differently.

Matt

WSU Students-Summer Session 2010

WELCOME everyone to a group blog by Wichita State University Digital Media Students Summer 2010.

We will uploading new media imaging, video, performance and extended media works to this site.

Interaction is encouraged by other students as well as other non members interested in the blog.

Thanks.

Lisa Rundstrom

Visiting Instructor, Digital Media

Wichita State University