"Nature Not Natural"

Digital Media

927px by 1200px

2018

There's always this reoccurring topic when working with digital media; the idea of Nature versus man-made and whether or not our works are too far from the natural. But I find that we, as artists, always reconnect those ideas somehow.

I always liked this picture I took from the Sutro Baths, where it captures the waves from the inside of a cave, with light reflecting off the surface of the water and contrasting against the intensely dark cave. It already diluted the idea of "natural". I wanted to stretch that idea out even further with this project by trying to remove the natural qualities of this picture. I used photoshop to drag out lines of pixels with the marquee tool and take out shapes with the polygonal lasso tool from the photo to already "damage" it's appearance. I then went into Textedit to remove and add some text for the final image [learned from Andrew Blanton]. I did that in 3 stages mainly because I was scared I would corrupt the data. But I actually liked how the 3 stages looked together, and I included them as a GIF. Even converting it into a GIF gave it another textured look because it could not render all the different colors from the image.

Happy accidents.