Assignment 4 - Animation Soundtrack

This is the soundtrack for my animation.  It is a 4 track piece created with Audacity, entitled "Europa". The base track is an ambient drone agreed on by the class. The other three tracks include:

The four notes that proceed the "Final Frontier" speech from Star Trek.
Sounds of a lightning storm on Jupiter, recorded by the Voyager probe.
The word "Jupiter" spelled out via Morse code.

Assignment 3 - Animation Collaboration

This is the animation that I completed for the previous assignment, only with an added transition to link it to the next video in our collaborative animation project.  It already links relatively seamlessly to the preceding video in the project.  The animation was again completed in Photoshop CS5.

 

Assignment 2 - Animation

The title of this piece is "Epiphany/Falling".  I completed the animation process using Adobe Photoshop CS5.

For this part of the project I animated a few elements from the middle panel of the triptych.  I feel that the gradual fading of the text and the slow fall and disappearance of the man adds a serene coda to the scene originally established with the Montage.

Reading 1 - Benjamin

Question 1:  If mechanical reproduction has, as Benjamin asserts, done away with the "aura" and the "ritual" long associated with art, then how has this influenced the democratization of popular art?  Is a perfect print of "Starry Night Over the Rhone" or the work of any popular contemporary artist radically different than whatever decoration was common before Mechanical reproduction, and has this led to a larger intrusion of the "fine arts" into the popular consciousness?

Question 2:  Has the advent of instantaneous mass-dissemination of media, and the subsequent individualization of that consumption made possible by the internet made fears of art being used to shape public perception obsolete or more pressing?

Assignment 1 - Triptych Montage

The Title of this Triptych is "Epiphany".  I assembled it in Adobe Photoshop Elements CS3.  I used scans from the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore, as well as scans of a sticker and my passport.  The rest of the images were culled from Google.

This piece is meant to illustrate the moment when one realizes that in the grand scheme of the universe, their existence is an infinitesimal blip.  What might seem to be earth-shattering is just as unimportant as anything else.  But even if the universe is cold and unreachable, there is still beauty in its machinations- unfolding slowly on an unimaginable scale, comfortably unconcerned by the entirety of life as we know it.