60-461/761: Experimental Capture
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Spring 2020 • Profs. Golan Levin & Nica Ross
Task: Photograph a scar and write about it.
I made an infographic of my girlfriend’s scars from being a sous chef. She also has a gnarly scar further up her arm from trying to stand on a plastic reindeer as a kid. She fell off the reindeer and impaled herself on the antlers 🙁
Every day, like I’ve done for the last two years of grad school at CMU, I wake up and make coffee. It is what makes me feel “normal.”
At my cousin’s house, the same is true. Except I use his glass cup, and his chrome straw. The pink sliver in the straw is me, trying to feel normal by drinking this iced coffee as I finish my thesis.
Discovery: My camera has a fake tilt-shift program on it, and I really enjoy playing with it, it muffles images in a really interesting way.
It also feels very quiet and empty outside, fewer cars, fewer people, and significantly fewer frozen pizzas.
Walk Outside(ish), I needed to go to the grocery store to get food. Walked to one and took pictures on the way using only the fake “miniaturizing” feature.
People things:
Covid-19 shifts
Documentation of a walk around downtown Burlington, Vermont on a rare 60° day (it’s snowing now.) It’s even emptier than usual as most of the businesses are closed. I wanted to capture the sense of abandonment and muted color palette. I also like seeing how ‘beautiful’ images are created by humans attempting to reconstruct nature.
Complete album (71 photos)
I don’t go for that many walks anymore. I am trying to avoid the parks (and even the streets for that matter). It is still p crowded sometimes and I am trying to do my part as case #s jump here in NYC. Yesterday it was raining. In light of my anxiety of being a young person who gets v sick from the COVID I am trying to quit smoking. It’s probably time anyways. Yesterday I was outside for just 10 minutes. I walked to the end of the block taking a photo with every step. This GIF is a lil stop motion of the results. I enjoyed this offering.
On Friday, I woke up to it absolutely pouring rain outside. By 8:30, it all suddenly cleared up, and I went out for a walk. There was an absurd amount of worms everywhere. I took pictures of them for about an hour (and was extremely careful where I stepped…)
To sort them:
Enjoy! (see if you can find the 2 bonus slugs). I will post the high-quality versions online somewhere…
Series taken from an iPhone through Canon lenses (Wide/Standard/Zoom).
Fortunately I was able to go out on a walk on Saturday afternoon in the woods of Connecticut and stumbled upon two things:
1.) These wild foam patterns on top of a stream. I’m used to seeing it be clumped together in a corner, but the flow around the rock meant that they made these pretty interesting patterns.
2.) These leaves which absolutely flabbergasted me. There was a bunch of them stuck to rocks along the route in multiple places and I have no idea how they’re remaining where they are, but they’re particularly crispy and act like very very thin potato chips.
Make a gallery of the art in your parents’ boyfriend’s house.
I’m now in Burlington, VT, staying with my boyfriend and his roommates. It’s great & helpful to be able to spend this time with someone I love.
But we haven’t spent this much time together in a long time, and it’s weird and new and challenging to say the least.
All the art in his house is slightly crooked (lol). We got a good laugh out of that the other day, and decided that it felt like a Wes Anderson movie or something, where all the decor is just slightly off. There’s a vase on the mantle, but it’s empty. There are a couple plants, but they’ve definitely been neglected. It’s kind of cozy, but kind of incomplete; kind of home-y, but kind of unsettling. It’s a good match for how I feel.
I know Meijie, she’s in the design program and we have a bunch of classes together. We’ve hung out a couple times in a group context, but I wouldn’t necessarily call us friends, at least not close friends. She’s incredibly close with one of my best friends, though. Thinking of friends’ friends (who wouldn’t fall into the category of my own friends), Meijie was one of the first people that came to mind. I think this is because she’s just visually very distinctive. She’s one of those people who even if you don’t know her, if you’ve seen her you remember her. Anyway, she came to mind and I drew her.
