Second Life House

I found making a house to be very interesting, time consuming, and something I enjoyed doing. When I first began, I really didn't have a plan of what I was going to do. I just figured whatever came to me as I was building would be what I would do.

As I started getting into it, I found that I really enjoyed building my house. However, I only wish I wasn't a perfectionist. Yes, I know it can be a good quality to have at times, but it took me about 4 hours to build this simple little house. I'll admit, a lot of the time was spent learning and figuring out how to do things.

After I had completed a very simple square house with a roof, I was not very happy with it and wanted windows and a small place to walk in. Since I didn't know how to create windows, I completely re-did the walls of my house. I made four walls around an opening for a window - this means that four walls made up just one wall. Then I copied it to make the opposite side. Then I did the same procedure to make a different window shape for my back wall. 

After completing my walls, I made a place to walk in and put a roof over it. After adding my floor, my structure was complete and just needed textures. Because I was not too fond of most of the textures, I know my house is a little tacky. I mostly just wanted to understand how everything worked.

The most time consuming portion, however, was trying to make my textures match each other after they had been stretched out. For the top triangle part on the outside of my house I just could not get it to match, so that is the one spot that looks a bit out of place. However, the rest of it I think I did a pretty good job trying to get it to match up.

Chapter Five

Visual Technologies, Image Reproduction, and the Copy

The introduction of sequential photography and motion picture film in the late 1800s corresponded with an increased desire to visualize movement in the increasingly mobile and fast-paced society of the late nineteenth century. By capturing moving images in a sequence of pictures, one is able to see things that the unaided eye cannot see. For instance, the example of the horse from the book: Muybridge was asked to determine whether a horse's hooves ever all leave the ground at the same time when galloping, or not. By setting up cameras that would horse would trigger as it ran, Muybridge was able to gather a sequence of the horse's run and each position of the hooves. Because of these pictures, he was able to determine that yes, the horse actually is airborne for an instant while running. One thing I found interesting was that taking motion pictures also help to portray certain things in a different medium. For example, in figure 5.1 the picture shows the car in motion, but due to the speed the car is traveling, the wheels look elongated and much larger. Artists then use this effect when drawing cartoons to help give the appearance of a car in motion.

The invention of cinema involved both the invention of a moving picture camera and projector and a flexible form of film (celluloid) that could be projected and reprojected without falling apart. Historians can agree that the origins of the cinema are due to the invention of motion picture film, the ability to make films, and the projector.

The photograph is related to "the real" because it is believed that a photograph shows exactly what is seen. It is a realist form because of its guarantee of having physically been copresent with the person, object, or scene. This means that every shadow, wrinkle, and object is exactly as how the eye sees it; nothing is left out or added. However, today, with digital technologies, photographs can be altered. Anyone with a digital camera, a home computer, and a cable can download images and print them out immediately, or they can copy them into other programs to be edited, enhanced, or altered in any way the editor chooses, whether it is framing, composition, color, or adding or subtracting actual objects and elements from the picture.

Digital Technology has also allowed us different modes of display. Rather than going to the nearest Walmart or CVS and and having your pictures printed with a duplicate to hand to a friend or family memeber, we are able to post pitures on the internet, on websites, on CDs, etc.

Second Life Appearance

This week when I was trying to figure out how to work Second Life and creating a new outfit, i decided to keep it simple, yet again. Since I am just beginning, I want to get the hang of how to create things, and then focus on how elaborate the things I create are later. 

Therefore, I did the basics. I started out by going through the fabrics and seeing which ones went well on my avatar's body (certain patterns definitely did not). After choosing a linen shirt, I changed the color to a dark red, which happens to be my favorite color.

I then tried certain pants and skirts trying to decide which ones I liked better with my shirt. Because I liked the look of the skirt better, I decided to match my shirt and skirt to make it appear to be a dress. Therefore, I set both of the fabrics to linen, matched the skirt with the dark red color, and then started playing with the lengths. I shortened the sleeves on my shirt to make it appear as a sleeveless turtleneck that goes down into a fitted short dress. I also like my avatar to smile because if I am happy, then I believe she should appear happy as well.

Then after dancing at the huge win at the Clemson vs. Duke basketball game (74-47), I was in such a good mood for the rest of the night I decided my avatar should appear like she was dancing too.

Chapter Four

Chapter four deals with realism and perspective. Realism in the visual arts is when the realist image depicts something as it would be seen by the eye. Realism refers to a style of art that is understood to accurately represent nature or the real. The goal of realist art is to reproduce reality as it is. With that being said, the artist is always going to depict what they see differently from how another person sees that image. For instance, the artist could be focusing on a portion of a landscape in the background, but a different artist could be focusing on a different portion of that same landscape but it could be in the foreground. Therefore, these two pictures would come out completely different even though they are still of the same image. One may have more detail and the other may be just a general image. Therefore, since different depictions are made by different people when looking at an image, is there ever really realism?

Perspective, on the other hand, refers to a set of systems or mechanisms used to produce representations of objects in space as if seen by an observer through a window or frame. When using perspective, there is a vanishing point that all lines must go to. This creates the illusion of objects going back into space or coming forward. Here is an example of a perspective drawing that I drew:

The image is actually drawn in two-point perspective. This is when there are two vanishing points that the lines are drawn towards. In this particular image, the two points are not even on the picture, they go off onto either side past the paper.

Another topic the chapter talks about is the camera obscura. This is a simple device that is based on the phenomenon that light rays bouncing off a well-lit object or scene, when passed into a darkened chamber (a box or room) through a tiny hole, create an inverted projection, which can be seen on a surface inside the chamber. These devices were also found in artists' studios, where they were used, much like the perspectival grid, as a drawing instrument. This technique was used by the artist Vermeer. It is described in the novel Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chavalier. In the novel, Vermeer uses the camera obscura to help him realize what is missing from his paintings in order to make them perfect. He will seem finished with a painting, then he will look through the camera obscura. After looking through it, he would either subtract something from his painting, or add something that originally was not there but needed to be there to make the painting perfect to his standards.