Free Software Project - Development

The problem with art/creativity is that everyone has different opinions, which was certainly true for my Free Software project. When DEVELOPING my ideas (haw haw), I took on board the feedback that our visiting tutor who had devised the project had given me - saying that the drawing I'd done was good as a kicking-off point but in itself wasn't enough for the newspaper page. He had liked my idea of making a scroll with code on it so I decided to give that a go and compose an image bringing in all the separate elements I'd worked on.

I did a bit more research into the Torah (not the actual scripture obviously just the form it takes) and headed to woodwork to make a couple of wooden cylinders with handles to hold the paper. It was a pretty simple joinery task but nonetheless I enjoyed doing it pretty much by myself, relishing my new-found shakey confidence with power tools.

Next I screen-printed lines of code I took from the HTML of my previous blog post about the project with luminous green ink. It didn't print quite as fluorescent as I had wanted annoyingly but time waits for no man so I just dealt with it and stuck the whole thing together (I had tried to tea-stain the print but as screen-printing uses water-based inks the tea just sort of shifted the letters about which was a cool effect but not what I was wanting).

I photographed my scroll in various positions and started playing about with pictures of it and some typewritten quotes I'd lifted from the article I was originally looking at. I liked the idea of using a typewriter as it uses one of the most popular coding fonts - Courier - and I love a lil' bit of physical/digital interplay. 

To push that a bit further I added in a hand cursor symbol to reference the pointers which are used to read lines of the Torah to avoid damage to the delicate paper. I liked the parallels between that physical object which can't be touched and the information on a screen which is also separate from the physical and which we can't physically interact with. So I had lots of threads floating about and decided to tie them all together in the grossest computer aesthetic I could muster, so had a look at vaporwave and MS Paint type stuff and attempted to channel those influences into my final piece.

I liked that I made all the elements of the image by hand but then it was clearly and poorly brought together digitally, showing the capabilities and limitations of the media. It's a pretty ugly thing but I kind of perversely liked it and thought there were some good ideas in it. My regular tutor however seemed to take a different view and said she preferred the drawing and thought it could have stood alone as a final piece. So I guess something I'm starting to realise is that you can't please everyone. Feedback is important but I think it's often best just to go with an idea that you like and find an audience rather than trying to fit in to someone elses style or ideas.