Independent Study

For one of my classes I did an independent study. I set out with a vague goal of creating a video piece that incorporated text into an environment. Eventually that turned into text being the driving force rather than being inserted into something. Here's the video:

When I Was Young from Harrison Simon on Vimeo.

Ugh

OK so I've been having a bit of an art-funk lately, and unfortunately not enough of one for it to be an Art Garfunkel. All of my more serious work has been stalling out and not picking up. Fortunately everything I haven't been taking super seriously has been coming out pretty well, albeit silly and imperfect.

I've been playing around with making art on my phone for a while but recently started playing around with an app called Everyday Looper. It's a four-track recording app that loads up a few bars and then loops everything you record on to one of the four tracks. You can do a ton of things like combine tracks, lower volume of the tracks and then export them all later to play around with. Here's something I made.
EDL by harrisimon
It's really off because I forgot which BPM I recorded at and couldn't get the measures to perfectly line up when I threw them together in Garageband. Never the less it is fun.

In addition I've started to play around with another app just called Everyday. It was created in part by the photographer Noah Kalina of Noah Takes-A-Photo-of-Himself-Everyday-for-6-Years fame. It reminds you to take a picture of yourself every day for a set time. It then compiles them all into a movie. I've only been doing it for a few days so I don't have too many frames.

That's all for now.

Travel Post

I'm on spring break right now and I'm beautiful rainy Portland, Oregon. I went to a Chinese Garden yesterday and made a panorama with my dorkphone.

Work Progressed!

Here's my final project!

OROBOROS

It's meant to be played / projected on a loop.

Work in Progress

For my art class I'm currently working a project dealing with spam mail. I found two spam messages in my spam-box that were for ordering Eastern European brides. Like all spam mail it was worded strangely. I built off of this aspect by having the computer transcribe the email and then feed it through a speech recognition program. I repeated this several times till the message were even more incomprehensible. I'm going to be taking the speech recordings and creating a video piece out of them. For now I have just made a text piece out of them.

Laser Bears

Laser Bears! I'll post more new stuff soon. I promise. I hope. I should.

Updayte. Uh-uh-updayte ya'.

Hi gentlefolk. The image above is a drawing I made in high school. Similar materials and technique to the last one.

In other news I'm taking an art class where pretty much everyday we do something in a book for the course. Each page in the book contains instructions for an activity or simple task. I'll be posting some things that I do in the class and sometimes things I do in the book.

The drawing on the front is a result from one of the pages where the instructions were to give the book a disguise.

More Old Stuff

Bike Ride

I made this quite a while ago. I forget what exactly the inspiration was aside from taping a tripod to my bike. Perhaps Albert Hoffman's bike ride.

Bike from Harrison Simon on Vimeo.

One Second Selves from Harrison Simon on Vimeo.

Tree

IMG_1225

Originally uploaded by harrisimon

Stitched together images

This Is Big Business

This is a sound-piece I made for a class about text. The project had to deal with 'mining' text so I took recently listened songs and crafted a poem out of them. It is also the first in a two part of pieces I did dealing with phantom radio broadcasts.

Flash

Flash

Also, if people would like to share and be authors on this blog(aboutit) I'd love to make multiple author accounts.

Snow from Harrison Simon on Vimeo.