Andrew Fishman

I took two pictures of my face pressed against a piece of glass and edited it in Photoshop so that the skin that was touching the glass is in black, and everything else is in white.  What do you think?  Should I change or invert the colors?  Which picture should I use?  Other suggestions?  I’ll do the real piece by hand, so it’ll be smoother and less blocky. 

To make the piece I described earlier, wire it as indicated with an Arduino Uno and put this as the programming:

The finished piece, entitled “Time (1176/1374)”

It’s designed to go a very small interval every two hours, which totals about one foot per month.  The title is a reflection of the number of days I will be in college, and the amount of time that has passed so far.  Each semester is marked with black electrical tape on the floor to signal its passing. 

Some criticism I received was that there did not seem to be an “ending” to the piece, that it would reach the door, but nothing would happen.  Others said that they could not discern the direction in which it was facing.  I hope to address those concerns when I reinstall the piece tomorrow for a show (It will be titled “Time (1190/1374)” because fourteen days will have passed since the first installation.)  I’m going to install a ramp into the wall so that when I graduate, it will fall off of the end. 

My next post will detail the programming and wiring it contains, in the spirit of open source. 

A work in progress—I’m designing a car that will move about a tenth of an inch every day, which I’ll set on a track that corresponds to my time in college (via carefully measured marks).  When I graduate, it’ll fall off the end. 

It’s done by hand, using something called Contrast-O paper.  It’s basically a white sticker on a piece of black plastic.  I use an exacto knife to slice and peel away sections of white, revealing the black.  Thanks for showing my work! 

My next project for Experimental Imaging: entitled “Take a Five Minute Break.”  The project is to work with light and sound.  I’m going to have my class sit in a darkened room for five minutes with noise-blocking headphones on.  To get an idea of the experience, turn off your lights and any music you’re listening to and watch this video. 

In my Human Sexuality class, we went over the theoretical models of gender and sexual identity.  They all seemed too simplistic. (Freud’s is only heterosexual and homosexual, Kinsey’s and Storms’ don’t include asexual or gender neutral people, etc.)

I decided to make one with three axes, one for male, one female, and one labeled “X” for whatever other axis a given individual would like.  (If the pictures are unclear, “X” is meant to go back in space as a third dimension)  As a cisgendered heterosexual male, my sexual identity is the first example: (0,10,0) (10,0,0).  The first set of coordinates corresponds to your gender identity, and the second corresponds to whom you are attracted to. 

What do you think?  Am I missing anything? 

I decided to have my presentation on five computer monitors, because the pieces were meant to be viewed on computers, not printed out and mounted in a gallery.  Ideally, I would have opened them up in 3D Wings, so that viewers could rotate them and see all sides, but the program wasn’t installed on every computer. 

This might be the final piece in the series.  Five seems like a reasonable number, given that each takes a few hours, including the time it takes to upload and edit the footage. 

This one was particularly tough, because I kept trying to use the “Mirror” tool in ways I don’t think it was meant to be used.  I selected several planes and clicked “Mirror,” which should reflect the entire shape I’m working with over each of the selected planes.  Doing that eight at a time means that my computer has to work with hundreds of thousands of planes at once.  My PC didn’t seem to like it, as you can see in the last video, which features a solid minute of a frozen screen. 

Keep in mind when you inevitably get bored of the error messages that I speed up these videos between 400% and 1600%, to get them to a watchable length. 

The fourth experiment in the series.  I’m starting to get a feel for what I want to do with this project.  I’ve become so frustrated with the program, which, although useful and brilliant, has started freezing whenever I try to do something wildly irrational and ridiculous. 

I think this project will end up being a statement on how the artistic process is hidden from the public, and is instead scrubbed free of imperfections.  Viewers rarely see how much the artist may have struggled with a piece before it is finished, which for me, is a lot of what it means to be an artist. 

The third in the series.  I tried to do something representational this time, but wasn’t able to get it up to how I wanted it, partially because 3D wings froze twice.  I need to figure out how to use this program in a more sophisticated way, so I don’t always rely on blocking out areas and letting the “Doo Sabin Subdivision” take care of smoothing out the form. 

The second experiment in the series.  Most notably, I discovered a way to smooth out shapes, which made the process more fun, but also made my computer freeze halfway through.  You can see me close all of my other programs to try to give it some memory space.

My first try using 3D Wings, a free CAD program that my Experimental Imaging teacher recommended.  This was mostly an experiment, but when I finished, I decided to make it look professional, add music, etc.  I’m going to do a few more like this until I get the hang of the program and I can do exactly what I want it to do. 

I have a book out for sale now!  It’s the first fifty of the high contrast nudes I did.  I might do a second series if this becomes at all popular.  I’m deciding between doing fifty men, fifty non-traditional women, a mixture, etc.  They’d also be bolder in what I would do, not always outlining the figure, so that the end products could be more dynamic and intriguing. 

If you have a Kindle, check it out—I made it as cheap as I could (Amazon won’t let me give it away for free). 

The model didn’t show up one day for the drawing session, so we took turns posing clothed for each other.  This drawing is of a friend of mine I met there. 

I rephotographed a painting I did back in 2007 because I wasn’t satisfied with how the colors came out.  The were never true to the painting, and I didn’t like that it made the painting look inaccurate. 

Another ink wash assignment.  This was different from the first one in that I used black and white acrylic paint in the last layer instead of only ink.  The black is the darkest areas, and I used the white to clean up the edges. 

Something I did a few years ago: I zoomed into a candid picture of myself and found each of these fifty colors somewhere in my skin.  Each square represents a pixel, blown up to be clearly visible.  

A fascinating assignment for a Painting class I took.  We were instructed to paint from a live model and produce two pieces, one “objective” and one “subjective.”  The “objective” one was to be approached scientifically, and the goal was to make it as accurate visually as possible.  The “subjective” one was more whatever we were inspired to do by the figure and the pose, but grounded in reality.  (My objective is the one on the left, the subjective is on the right)  I had a lot of fun walking around the room and seeing how differently everyone approached not only the subjective one, as I would have expected, but also the objective one.  

For the objective one, I had the most difficulty getting the blue behind the figure to work.  It was foreign to me to not just paint what I saw exactly as I saw it.  I painted the blue the color of the paint on it, and my teacher kept telling me to make it darker.  I couldn’t understand what he meant, because the color was clearly accurate.  He was referring to the idea of “equivalent colors,” the idea that every color must relate in some way to every other color in the composition.  He was right—I had matched the wall well, but hadn’t accounted for the rest of the piece when doing so.  That’s why the subjective one has a different color blue—it’s accurate to the wall, and happened to work its color scheme and composition.  

A work in progress.  I decided to push myself further than just doing the contrast between black and white.  I’m using other sets of contrasting colors (red/green, blue/orange, etc.) to try to define the tone of the figure as well.  So for the first layer, I only painted the areas I perceived as being more black than white.  Layer two, I only painted the areas I perceived as more red than green.  Then more purple than yellow, and then more blue than orange.