Digital Literacy: June 2009

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Portfolio for school

View more OpenOffice presentations from tclord.

This is the portfolio I submitted for approval into the BVA.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Iraqi born artist Wafaa Bilal has exhibited his art world wide, and traveled and lectured extensively to inform audiences of the situation of the Iraqi people, and the importance of peaceful conflict resolution. Bilal's 2007 dynamic installation Domestic Tension placed him on the receiving end of a paintball gun that was accessible online to a worldwide audience, 24 hours a day. Newsweek called the project “breathtaking” and the Chicago Tribune called the month-long piece "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time," and named Bilal its 2007 Artist of the Year. Bilal has exhibited worldwide including in Baghdad, the Netherlands, Thailand and Croatia; as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum and various other US galleries. His residencies have included Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California; Catwalk in New York; and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In fall 2008 City Lights published “Shoot an Iraqi: Life, Art and Resistance Under the Gun,” about Bilal’s life and the Domestic Tension project.

http://wafaabilal.com

The Yes Men

The Yes Men are a group of culture jamming activists who practice what they call "identity correction" by pretending to be powerful people and spokespersons for prominent organizations. They create and maintain fake websites similar to ones they want to spoof, and then they accept invitations received on their websites to appear at conferences and TV shows. The Yes Mens most famous work was rebuilding the World Trade Organisation website and linking it on http://www.gatt.org/ (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). The fake site began to receive real emails from confused visitors, including invitations to address various elite groups on behalf of the WTO, to which they responded as if they were the actual WTO.

Poladroid demo vid.

This is a demo video showing you how easy it is to use the free software of Poladroid. It is one of the easiest programmes as it involves just simply drag and drop. Once you drag your chosen image onto the camera it then processes the image. At any time during the colour transformation you can request a preview which is handy as sometimes an unfinished image can look just as if not more effective.

Free Software

Free software is simply software that doesn't cost you anything. This can be software legally downloaded from the Internet. Some examples of free software is Blogger which I am using now to blog to the world and gives me a free online presence. Another example is Gimp which is image editing software which can be used as effectively as Adobe Photoshop. Blender is also free software that is used for 3D animation and Audacity is handy if you want to quickly edit any audio file. In April I discovered Poladroid which is free software that converts any image by cropping and adjusting colour levels to replicate a Polaroid image. It is quite a novelty but still fun, here are a few images of mine that I used Poladroid on.