Week 03 | Resolution

New Year's Resolutions are a tradition is based in the hope that reflecting on the past and resolving to make a new will simplify one’s life. If you think about the most common resolutions, they are often removing something from the person’s daily life or habits. In doing this, a new person should emerge! (That is if it's kept) Similarly in digital media, the constrction of an image can be simplified through the means of resolution. Resolving the image into more managable parts can reveal alot about the complexity you began with.



Almost a century ago and without the aid of any pixel-generating computer software, the itinerant photographer Arthur Mole (1889-1983) used his 11 x 14-inch view camera to stage a series of extraordinary mass photographic spectacles that choreographed living bodies into symbolic formations of religious and national community. In these mass ornaments, thousands of military troops and other groups were arranged artfully to form American patriotic symbols, emblems, and military insignia visible from a bird’s eye perspective. Living Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, for which 21,000 troops assembled at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1918, is the best-known of Mole’s photographs. The image is characteristic of Mole’s work in that it wavers between the compositional effect of the whole (i.e. a portrait of Woodrow Wilson) and the desire to focus upon the obscured individuals who constitute the image, thereby undermining the optical illusion of the totality to a degree.

In our class, resolution also has many meanings. Mainly, we will talk about resolution as the depth of an image. The depth of a pixel-based image relies solely on its quality at the most basic level; here, the image is an unrecognizable pattern of colored squares. When organized into an image, however, these seemingly disparate parts become something much more legible. “Usually we try to produce images that are of sufficient resolution to render these individual pixels imperceptible, but seeing pixels is not necessarily a bad thing. Prominent pixels call attention to the process…”

“Computer Composition With Lines” 1964 This work closely mimics the painting “Composition With Lines” by Piet Mondrian (1917). When reproductions of both works were shown to 100 people, the majority preferred the computer version and believed it was done by Mondrian. This early investigation of the aesthetics of computer art has become a classic and is described in the published paper by A. Michael Noll, “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian's ‘Composition with Lines’ and a Computer–Generated Picture,” The Psychological Record, Vol. 16. No. 1, (January 1966), pp. 1-10.

One 11” x 17” .jpg construction at 150 dpi in RGB color mode. This construction should contain the following information: A minimum of one original intersection image, one image index, and five selection filter images generated from the image index. The way in which you layout these individual images to form a cohesive construction is critical if we are to understand your craft and process. Use the grid and guides in Photoshop to generate proper alignments and do not use notations or text. Again, use the filing nomenclature: for student BobSmith, “A02_Smith_B.jpg.” All .jpg files are due in your backpack by 12:00 PM on Tuesday 12 February.

Late work will not be accepted. Please bring your noted image from Assignment 01 to class Wednesday 13 February.