FALL 2021

DigiFest is an opportunity for seniors to share their work with industry professionals and receive recognition for what they consider to be their best work during their time in UH's Digital Media program. Through the use of parallel structures and composition, my goal was to portray my own interpretation of the program and attempt to bring the often overlooked elements of DIGM to the center of attention.

I have been increasingly interested in observing the overlap between art and math (and science), as I find more of my endeavors, both educational and personal, involve reconciling the relationship between the two. Therefore, I wanted to use this relationship to highlight the value and unique quality of the Digital Media program placing equal emphasis on both aspects. Many of the DIGM courses promote the idea that math and art are concomitant elements rather than entirely opposite subjects, which is an idea that is becoming less common with emergent technologies and media. I also have experienced the idea of art/design as being a "lesser" discipline because people tend to oversimplify it, so that was another angle I wanted to approach the project from by compositing/collaging the interfaces together. The intent was to show the amount of computer programs students are expected to work with, as well as the sheer amount of technical and mathematical elements spanning said programs such as symmetry/asymmetry/balance, RGB/HSB/etc., the exposure triangle in photography, backend code, grids/formatting, and more that students are expected to consider. There are a lot of decisions that go into how something is arranged, and since the DigiFest showcase should be representative of not just the final result, but all the hard work DIGM students put into their entire experience at UH, I thought this would be a good area to comment on since it is a subject I feel strongly about myself.

To accomplish my goal, I started by creating two collages/compositions pulling pieces of various interfaces and programs used in DIGM courses, including Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Premiere, as well as C++ code from an IDE, Excel spreadsheets/formatting elements, and miscellaneous other pieces such as keyboard shortcuts, the (at the time) BTC to USD conversion rate, and hex codes. I wanted to create a kind of "recursive" effect of using metadata itself to create art/design, which has its own metadata in turn. For the background, I created a canvas texture in Photoshop that resembled a drop of paint, however the effect was created with the anti-alias function off so on closer inspection it appears more as pixels. Small other details were included to suggest overlapping, such as the text/titles set to a lower opacity so they overlap, however those details were intentionally more subtle. I did want to make sure I would not overcrowd other areas of the composition, as the collage I made to be the centerpiece of the project had a lot of detail and I wanted to strike a balance.