Project 2: "Water Windows"

Final Blog: For my final project I decided to create a t-shirt design. Many people are creating t-shirt designs with writing of their own or someone else's, much like Virgil Abloh with off-white, so I decided that I would try it out. I had a few of my friends each create a design on the shirt along with my own. In the center of the shirt I was going to do a screen print of “project black” but just from financial issues, I had to re-think my approach. I decided to safety pin the “project black” to the shirt much like a track jersey, the back was supposed to have a safety pinned number as well, but it did not turn as well as the front. Overall, I think that I could have pushed this project more, I was not completely satisfied with this project at all. I really think being able to screen print the “project black” on to the shirt would of made it look a lot cleaner. Moving forward, when I do have a better financial situation I am going to create this t-shirt how I now envision it and make it part of my wardrobe.

For my fourth project, I compiled 152 of the poems that I wrote over the past year together. Then, I paired each poem with a quote that is is similar to the poem written. I chose to do 150 poems and 2 final "doxologies" to mirror the biblical psalms. I did this using Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. Over the past year, I have gone through a sort-of "deconstruction" of my faith. Writing these poems became a way to process this deconstruction. Now, looking back, each poem has a story attached to it. I can remember clearly where I was and what inspired me to write each poem. But, at the same time, I think these poems and this story of deconstruction to rediscovery is not just exclusive to me. By compiling these poems, pairing them with quotes, and sharing them with the world, I am trying to connect my story to all of our stories. I am trying to find out how the whole is greater than the sum of its small and fragmented parts. The book is meant to be read in two page spreads, with the poem on the left and the quote on the right. The book is 351 pages long, and is divided into three sections: "Broken Psalms," "Blue Hymns" and "Darkness Dancing." Each part is then split up into the months that the poems were written in, beginning in April 2017, and ending in April 2018. It is called "Between Prose and Poem" after a poem that uses that same phrase. Here is the cover: Here is a few example of some two page spreads: Here is a link to the entire pdf. Please download and read! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qHN_BVXsVEKddjLooQpyrJxdxX6sY-Ym/view?usp=sharing ______ In addition to this 351 page book, I compiled only the poems together into another book and called it "Between Belief and Unbelief." I used Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to publish it on amazon. Both ebook and paperback are available to purchase :) Here is the link to the book on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1980925380?ref_=pe_870760_150889320 This is the book description on amazon: "In April 2017, I started a personal project of writing a poem a day for an indefinite amount of time. As the days went by, it became more like a poem every other day. Then it became a poem wherever and whenever inspiration struck. After an entire year of this, I had written over 180 short poems. This book is simply a selection of 152 of those poems. This book is simply a year of my life told through poetry and rhyme. These are my broken psalms, my blue hymns, and my dancing songs." Here is a photo my friend sent me when he got his copy in the mail. I am so glad I got to compile an entire year's worth of poems into a book. I am very happy with how this final project turned out!

In my final project, Trilogy of Machine Reflections , I displayed three different animated portraits aspects of myself. The materials used was electronics (two laptops and a small TV) and computer animation (various programs) made from both existing and original material. I utilized the human head shape of a typical portrait on all three screens to visually tie the art together. Project as presented in Cabal gallery Photo still Label School portrait: I wrote a bit of creative code detailing some of my routine “while (inCollege)” following C style programming language. My “functions” include wakeUp(), attendClass(), doHomework(), eat(), and sleep() in a continuous loop. Other text included in the animation: my name in ASCII, hex, and binary, my birth date (04 21 1998) and my planned years of attendance at CU Boulder to complete my degree in Computer Science (2016-2020). The portrait aspect uses a human skull to represent my “dead inside” mentality. Hobbies and interests portrait: This one is meant to be a bit more “fleshed” out with the apps, programs, websites, etc that I use. The logos and symbols representing my interests are pasted over a face shape. In the glasses cut-out I put a short recording of the start of one of my League games (friend chat, invite, going into the game). I also included headphones around the face and animation of sound waves on the sides with pop-ups of lyrics from songs I’ve liked listening to recently. Digital artist portrait: I actually included a photo of my face here to represent this being the most direct “expression” of myself, and included separate animations inside the face cut-out and around it.