beautiful views (2020)
For FAKE NEWS: VCUarts’ 2020 Undergraduate Juried Exhibition, the first piece I had on show was Beautiful Views, where I used NVIDIA’s GauGAN Beta to generate photographic landscapes. The full artist’s statement is on the site, but I think it’s interesting how I was interested in AI generation tools during their early stages, and before they started stealing people’s work to create larger and more elaborate data sets. The results have a much more uncanny and less realistic look to them than one would get on a recent generator. view >>
troll simulator (2020)
The second piece I had in FAKE NEWS: VCUarts’ 2020 Undergraduate Juried Exhibition was an interactive piece called Troll Simulator. It’s exactly as the name suggests, with has a text box that you can enter as much text as you want into, and then when submitted presents one of several automated messages designed to mimic an interaction with a relatively low-level “internet troll.” I genuinely and earnestly love arguing with people online, so this is one’s a reminder for myself. view >>
self protrait (2019)
This is one of the earlier webpages I made when I was first learning to code, and starting to integrate it further into my design process. The prompt for the class was to make a self portrait of some sort, and they would be on display at an open house. Most students reasonably made large print-outs, and I put up clusters of smaller prints with QR codes on them to my digital gif collage. under reconstruction >>
psychic test (2019)
This was a fun one, partially inspired by how my friend carmi does his animations on their comic Godhead. The assignment was having to make a bunch of ordered pages, so you can now test your psychic abilities. I can’t remember if I ever fixed some of the interior code so it won’t show answers you’ve selected on previous attempts which is why it tells you to only take the test once lol. under reconstruction >>
playbill (2019)
This was a group project for a class where two upperclassmen were paired with two students who just joined the program to make a publication as well as design and build a physical location themed to read it in. My partner and I were probably the two most pretentious people in the class so we argued throughout the entire thing over what method of storytelling was the platonic ideal or the leading or exact paper quality we should use. Good times. I miss group projects. under reconstruction >>
into the ether (2019)
We had to choose a piece of writing to make multiple collages for and then some form of presentation. I was still completely obsessed with Homestuck so I chose Sonnetstuck’s parody of Detective Pony, where they make a complete version of the brief gag Hussie makes where the character Dirk writes over a copy of a children’s book. It’s still so good, and where I learned about pharmakon and memesis and stuff. I think about their parody of Plato’s Pharmacy with memes like every day. under reconstruction >>
locationsmile.vc (2019)
The prompt for this one was to make a booklet about a location. I was in a semi-competitive Overwatch team at the time, and have thought about digital spaces as parallel to physical spaces for some time. The text is taken directly from the text chat, and I also recorded and wrote out everything said during a practice game. Most of the text chat will be our coach yelling at us. I also did collages edited from game screenshots. under reconstruction >>
field notes (2019)
My mom was really getting into photography, and had a pretty unique style that I liked. As a gift I made her a book of her photography to also practice formatting, but it was fun in general. I really should get back into make art books. under reconstruction >>