Wire 106

I took the opportunity of teaching ds106 again to finally take a stab at Tom Woodward‘s historical selfies assignment. If I hadn’t waited until the last minute, I would have done a string of The Wire selfies, which I still plan to do. But given I did all my visual assignments in two hours last night, I’ll think of this as a warmup for bigger things to come. Because I have to say this is a very fun assignment, a a few other ds106ers have been trying it as well to great effect.

But in the meantime, I tried to do something punk rock because if it doesn’t look that good its all right because it’s part of the ethos I took the following shot from Alex Cox’s brilliant 1986 film Sid and Nancy as my image of Sid Vicious (so already a couple of mediations in given this is actually Gary Oldman).

I cut Sid out of the above image and pasted him into a layer with the old school, black and white image of the Chelsea Hotel (included below) using GIMP. Once I had the selfie image, I brought it into the Photoshop template (which worked seamlessly in GIMP) that Tom Woodward shared as part of the assignment. I scaled the selfie layer to make sure it fit over the image area in the template. After that, I adjusted the likes and hashtag layers in the template to show Sid was out of favor at this point in his career (only 2 likes!), and was in NYC—if you didn’t pickup on the Chelsea Hotel bit. Also, it was worth reinforcing his relationship status with Nancy. But the hashtags were an overt, if not pedantic, foreshadowing that this may be his very last selfie.

I’ve been admiring assignments like the Shakespearean LOLcat for a while now, and this time I decided to stop analyzing and start paralyzing with my awesome art! I knew the quote I wanted to do right away. It’s a line I’ve repeated regularly since reading Antony & Cleopatra in undergrad because I love the way it sounds—and it allows me to condescend my egregiously green judgement in the past. I’m just glad we didn’t have Facebook then, but I digress. It’s from the very end of Act 1, Scene 5 and spoken by Cleopatra when she is bemoaning her youthful fling with Ceasar:

My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then! But, come, away;
Get me ink and paper:
He shall have every day a several greeting,
Or I’ll unpeople Egypt.

Given the focus on salad days for this quote, I then searched for a LOLcat and salad on Google and found this bit of magic, in animated GIF form no less.

So, I downloaded the GIF and brought it into GIMP with the idea that I would add the quote to every layer. But it turns out this animated GIF was done as a mask (you can see how to do GIF masks in GIMP here) which means much of the background is untouched— and the GIF is smaller and cleaner.  After realizing this, I simply aligned the text on areas that do not animate, and merge them down to the background layer. This made the text appear consistently.  The only other hack around was airbrushing a black background for the second part of the quote because the green was getting lost in the log. I tried adding a drop shadow to the edges, but for some reason couldn’t do it in this GIF—anyone have any ideas why not?

Anyway, that was fun, and 2.5 stars to boot

I went through the assignment bank to see what hadn’t been done yet, and I was surprised to see the “Image Manipulation and Historical Narrative” hadn’t been done, so I decided to fix that. I figured I would take one of the more iconic images from the space landing and photoshop it—again

What if it wasn’t us? So uch of the investment in science, research and technology was spurred on by the Cold War, in particular Sputnik. In Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, Katie Hafner links Sputnik to the funding of ARPA which effectively gave us the internet. The same year we got a man on the moon, although the latter is controversial So, what if the commies got there first?

This was a fun assignment because it forced me to play with the perspective tool in Gimp, which was pretty simple and slick. I grabbed an image of the sickle and hammer in Google images that was wind blown, and added it to the Apollo 11 image as a layer and changed the perspective and blurred the edges. It’s not perfect, but enough for the illusion, and it’s good practice for design week!