This week, we participated in a two-part Material Inquiry involving digital imaging. The first part consisted of scanning an image into the computer, forming a pattern, and printing it on high-quality paper. I had had previous experience with scanning and printing images, but I had never had to form a pattern with image nor had I printed one on special kinds of paper, so this particular experience was a new and welcome one. I used various images from cooking magazines and the results are below!
I printed the first two images on on luster photo paper and the third on matte photo paper and I am extremely happy with the results. Each image has a very colorful, interesting pattern that fits really well with the types of paper I chose. It was a bit challenging trying to configure the printer and computer settings to print correctly on the different papers, but I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I was able to adapt and learn. Now that I have some more experience with scanning and printing images, particularly on different kinds of paper, I am hoping to further enhance these skills in order to be more readily prepared to help my future students as digital media becomes increasingly prevalent in art classrooms.
As for the second part of this Material Inquiry, we were required to "hack" images of ourselves. This was the first time that I ever explored coding and I had a great time doing so. First, we would change the photo from a .jpg file to a .txt file. Then, we would change the coding by deleting or copying and pasting chunks of it at a time before reverting the image back to a .jpg file and observing what changed. It was an extremely interesting experience and the results (pictured below) are actually pretty amazing!
The left image is the original picture of myself taken in San Diego and the right image is the end result after I "hacked" it 10 times. Learning how to hack images like this was a very challenging, yet intriguing, experience and I'm hoping to continue exploring this new skill so that I may create even more interesting image hacks. Furthermore, I believe that, as digital media becomes more prevalent in art classes, a project incorporating this hacking method could be a really fun and interesting project for my future students to participate in, perhaps even incorporating the scan/print part of this activity to create an even more challenging project for my students to explore!