2:33 in the Life of ____.

Time Travel

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The new implementation of laser technology to recreate the world in different eras is extremely interesting. It reminds me of many books, such as The Time Machine, that create adventure in a place in the past. We would no longer have to imagine what it was like to live when our grandparents were growing up, but we could visit it ourselves. Although I believe this technology to be extremely interesting and educational, I do not think that this technology will become commonplace in the homes of Americans any time soon. Adults would not be able to take to it very well, and I think many young adults and teenagers in the United States at this time have little or no interest in exploring the past. If this technology ever becomes commonplace enough to be on the the home desktops of people in the United States, I think that it would be unlikely for casual computer users to ever see a need to use it.

Emergent Flip Book

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TMA Redux

Museum Redesign

Internal Artwork

Molinet's Tragic Kingdom sheds a new light on the famous kid-friendly Disney. His Mickey Mouse has morphed into a character with fangs and dragon-esque features, allowing to a more terrifying feeling; this is not a theme park you would want to take your children to. Not only does the figure has a cartoon-like appearance, but the lettering and background are also designed as whimsical features. Molinet definitely knows how to get around Illustrator to use symbols such as the paint drip and sun ring to add an environment to the artwork.

Pablo Alfieri is a graphic designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. This design was created for the company Beautiful Decay to produce and sell commercially as t-shirts. It was produced along with one other design during the summer of 2009. Body Parts is a collage of human anatomy. The connection of unattached limbs makes the pieces seem as if they were ripped from off of a mannequin and the face without eyes only solidifies this. The piece is commenting on modern society’s ideas of beauty and how beauty is often not connected to an emotional soul.

Although Ricardo Ajcivinac seems to have a love for graffiti art, he shows us that not only does excel illustration, but also at photo manipulation. His piece Sunrise (2008) takes a photo of a woman and, using programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, to add lighting effects and fluid forms. Figures that frame the woman’s face, for instance, the surfer on her right, add to the sense of fluidity of the artwork and helps the viewer gain a sense of freedom from boundaries that the flowing forms create by running off the canvas.

Justin Maller is a freelance illustrator and art director based in Melbourne, Australia. A veteran digital artist of eight years, he has created illustrations for numerous companies and developed a reputation as a talented graphic designer. This work is a nod to a conventional form of art: paint flow out of the bottle and is ready for an artist to use. But Maller uses this theme of conventional artwork to create a new something unconventional and relative to the digital art world but creating a 3D flow of paint on which a surfer can ride the stream of paint.

Masaki Yokobe is a graphics designer based out of Japan. He has an extensive background working with multiple types of computer graphics, including motion, 2D, and 3DCG. As a CG designer at Namco, Yokobe gained experience created graphics of all types and to pay attention to small details. This piece shows his exploration of Photoshop. The image in the lower left-hand corner is the same as the one in the upper right-hand corner, but with multiple variations. The artist added a motion blur using the built-in filters and changed the hue and saturation of the figures to create even more chaotic alter egos of the characters.

Foursquare

I absolutely love the idea of Foursquare and wish they had it implemented in the Tampa area. However, I think the technology of the program should be used only as a social network for adults. Although many might think that this is a good way for parents to keep tabs on where their children are, I believe that constant monitoring of a kid's whereabouts is wrong. Children in the United States cannot obtain their driver's license until the age of 16. Any kid under this age needs their parents to drive them to places or have a friend pick them up from their home. In either situation, the parents would be able to know where their child was going (unless they have a child who lies without reason, in which case, there are more serious issues at hand).

Although this is a new program from monitoring a person's whereabout, the idea has been in the works for awhile. GPS is a relatively old technology and programs including Foursquare are only building on it. In the future, I expect to see a number of location monitoring programs that parents can use to track their kids, through the GPS in their phone and in cars, letting the parents know what destination the user has entered as well as the time and date.

The Simulated World's Economy

No Budget, No Boundaries: It's the Real You

In the current economic state, it is totally plausible to me that people would go to the online world to indulge in material items that they can not afford in the real world. On the fashion note, buying clothing is often about spending to get satisfaction and less about the actual item purchased. One can translate this experience to a virtual platform and get this satisfactory feeling without the guilt of spending the money they might need for food or housing.
Yet, I find it hard to understand why anyone would pay real money to get a bank account of fake currency. Sure you get more bang for your buck in the online world, but for all the money you spend, you get nothing of actual substance. It might be worth the initial investment for the experience, but if you don't monitor your bank account or save and earn interest, you'll be out of dough quick and really to put up even more cash. This nullifies the reasons to start playing in this online world in the first place: to save money and indulge in a conscious way. With all the money you end up spending, you could have just gone out and bought the real Louboutins you wanted.

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