Art

While attending the Open Data Days hackathon at the Copenhagen Business School, I joined the BYOB remixing event in collaboration with the National Gallery of Denmark, as well as working on an energy app for the Gatesense. The point was to use some of the artwork from SMK, and remix it into a new and strange, or perhaps comfortably abstract form. My Toy Warz project popped into my head at this point. The Toy Warz project is all about taking toys like Bratz or Barbie dolls, and mixing them up with weapons and imagery from war toys. I shoot the Toy Warz scenes in Michigan and then composite in layers in Photoshop for the final image. On past trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts, I had become accustomed to shooting images of landscapes to mix in with the Bratz dolls. So, it was actually a perfect that the SMK libraries would be used in the remix event.

SMK Remix

However, what I didn’t have was a lot of time to work on the project. At the Open Data Day I attended a workshop by Marieke Verbiesen (http://marieke.nu/blog/), a sort of uber-amazing animation and projection artist who was staying around Copenhagen for a little while. After running quickly through the SMK collection, I settled on The “Summer Spire” on the Chalk Cliffs of the Island Møn. Moonlight by Sødring, F and Zealand Landscape. Open Country in North Zealand by Johan Thomas Lundbye. They are both calm, beautiful landscapes, which mix quite well with the Blue Team action figure and crazy female creature beast (picked up in Ann Arbor, Michigan). With these two it was nice to give an increased juxtaposition between war, beauty, spring, and a cold-looking sea scene.

I had high aspirations of animating the whole scene in Adobe After Effects, but I was splitting my time with the art remixing and outlining the user flow for an Energy App which would give an energy profile of your life, lead in to gamification and see your energy impact on the world, blah, blah, etc.