This first collage was inspired from Tufte's Visual Explanations text. Its just a simple juxtaposition of a serendipitous relationship in shape and form. I had these bronze bird skulls that I had cast recently that i knew I wanted to use. I flipped open an old children's book and found an image of an ice cream cone that was exactly the same shape and size of the skull. I liked the relationship of the two, of similar difference, so i decided to constrain them here in this collage.
totem factotum
This second collage has become a visual analog for some of my work here at Digital Worlds on technologically augmenting empathy. The layout mimics the chakra system while paralleling Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, linearly up the center, while forwarning of ego or desire driven augmentation around the sides of the image. It is my fear that as we begin to augment our mental and physical bodies through technological enhancements that we will forget to augment our very souls. The powerful consumers of the world will be able to even more effortless exploit the worlds poor through their enhanced state of beings. I worry that as we merge with machines that our empathy and human spirit will wither if we do not actively seek ways to incorporate the incorporeal into technological systems. That is my purpose of these projects I am working on, to actively seek solutions to this problem.
So I have been teaching an after school art program for kids ages 5-7. For their most recent project I am trying to teach them how to bring concepts from the drawing board to life so I am having them all construct their own board games. Today we started with our concept sketches. Here are a few of them:
A game called "quick" in which players try to get through a forest as fast as they can without getting eaten by a bear.
A game like chess but with less pieces only one piece can capture the "king" and only one piece can kill this "king killer" also the board spaces will be hexagons to allow for 6 degrees of movement A soccer board game in which the ball moves via dice rolls but players move one square at a time. An action adventure board game with many divergent paths.
In addition I am simultaneously enrolled in a Game Design class as part of my masters degree at UF's Digital World's. I find it interesting (and a bit sad) that 5 to 7 year olds were able to generate more original and cohesive game concepts than a lot of the people in the class!
Similarly Different
