wait a minute.

So I'm frustrated with my assignment. Duh. The direction is coming together. Below is some progress I made, but re-reading the key paragraph from the article that's just a few paragraphs below, I found a clear source of guidance. Since the dude is claiming that computers can take over creativity and take on that sense of self that we have reserved for humans, I need to spending a crap load of time with creating it by hand. It needs to be tons and tons of work by hand. I don't know what that means exactly, and I don't have a lot of faith in my own hand at work, but I know that it's going to create a TON of meaning in response to this message. This is taking on a lot to communicate, but things are already coming into my mind.
Bonus - I know it's important to you (Alan) to see our hand, which has made me nervous in the past, but screw it - I'm ready to put that aside and start exploring.

So here is where I was today

AND HERE'S WHERE WE'RE GOING

http://www.antoineetmanuel.com/linconnu.html

Rewind

So back to the original bot. Turns out, the more I search photographic images of brains, the more nauseous I feel, which is not the feeling I want associated with my poster.
Thankfully, I found a pretty appropriate illustration of a brain in my roommates nursing book so I'm just going to run with it since that direction is what originally got me excited about the project.

how inconvenient

This is a very uneventful post. However, it will be marked with blatant honesty. I am rather discouraged about everything creative I am working on, including this project. I'm psyched about all of my concepts and the visuals are in my mind but I'm plugging away with nothing to show for it. Not to mention I have a jam packed Friday which allows for no progress tomorrow.
Therefore, I will be taking a personal day of letting my frustration go to focus on work, and then I shall hopefully be in a better place for production over the weekend. Blah. Sleep sleep. For the record, this is the earliest I've gone to bed since I can remember. White. Flag.

photomontage

first of all, this guy's stuff makes my heart race http://www.robjoe.com/
second of all, my dear sonja sent me all sorts of fun inspiration links for the photomontage direction. It could be softer, but it could also be creepy and eerie so I'm working with that in mind. Here are a few things that I grabbed through inspiration. enjoy.

direction

"But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence."

-This is the direction. To communicate in my image an actual combination of organic and artificial intelligence as one. 


So it's now time to make it real:

to add or not to add? that is my question

I found the entire article on Ray Kurzweil. Here it is....
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2048138,00.html

As I usually do, I'll be going over the original article for a critical assessment of how on target my illustrations are before tomorrow morning. More work has been done on manipulating the illustration and color application. I have one version that I'm pretty happy with at this point, but I'll do a few more versions this evening to compare across the board for which solution is working best.

***The questions that arose today were type - do I need it, and what could it be? That's why I figured a critical review of the article would be helpful in choosing to add type or not. At first thought, I wanted to bring Ray's name into it, but that might not be as helpful in addressing what is making me angry. I'm sure he's not the only one who enjoys this concept that he is introducing, so it would make it more of a personal attack to address him individually rather than doing something satirical about the concept of  putting our brains in robot bodies to become immortal. I think addressing the concept could be more impacting.

progress

I've switched to putting my sketches on the computer in an illustrator file. That way I can use it as a reference when applying the drawing fluid on the screen. I turned down the opacity on the robot layer over the brains for now just for the see through effect but I'll be dropping it in photoshop and playing with the overlays more before printing. That way I have a better idea of color combinations.