Digital Imaging - 'First Week'

'First Week'

My digital collage still maintains the same theme and message of chaos expressed through my manual collage. The digital collage now shows these ideas through a more logical process, similar to how a human brain would organise all the new experiences.

The image can be simply broken down to the character in the foregrounds thoughts of the week being downloaded to a computer, which is located in a massive computer hub with screens on the wall showing images of the week. These images and data are being organised into dates and graphs assembling the information into a logical form. 

I tried to keep the feeling of a three dimension work in a two dimensional form by creating depth through the use of a foreground mid ground and background. I decided that the colour red was a fundamental part of my image as it represented stress and gave a feeling of chaos.

I created a character, which represented my self as I wanted to incorporate how a human brain and a computer system sort of operate the same way in storing memorial in a logical form.

The main reason I choose to reflect on my week at university this way was because I wanted to create an image that was personal to show what it was like to adjust to a new experience. I found that my first week was a bit chaotic and I wanted to relate how the human brain can operate in a similar way to a computer system. I wanted to replicate how my image matched my thoughts.

I haven’t taken anything away from my manual collage as such in my digital version. I have just managed to compose the image to make it more aesthetically pleasing. All the core ideas were retained in the digital image, with the links between the neurological system and thoughts, feelings and memories. But were …….

There were several trial and errors before I managed to produce an image that I was happy with. It started with taking a photo of the manual collage and importing it into photoshop and de-cluttering the image and keeping the main visual elements like the keyboard keys and Utas symbol. I made attempts to create electrical wires in photoshop using opacities and glow effects but my main concern was that I wasn’t representing my week in quite the way I envisaged.  

This sparked two more attempts to create two more images with a typography approach which I first used in the manual collage. This however I did not find the most exciting visually stimulating piece of work.  It was creating with the intent that my thoughts and feelings were all linked together through the neuro networks of the brain and almost had a feeling that these thoughts could just escalate forever.

Challenges – the main challenges I faced was trying to create a sense of perspective without the viewer realising that infact there eye was following the picture from right to left. I wanted the viewer to try deceiver the information that my brain had to take in that week, rather than the viewer just seeing it as a flat image.