VISCOM1; Line Book; Final Statement

Streetviews

Streetviews is the name of my line study book.  Below is what is printed on the cover of this book:

Kansas City is full of bustling streets and busy offices, it never slows down. I have come to enjoy taking walks around the city taking time to slow down, take a breath, and escape from my everyday tasks. In doing this, I have come to find there are innumerable parts of this city that are stunningly gorgeous. Everything from the office buildings in the business district, the apartment buildings on the plaza, art pieces strewn throughout the city, sewer covers on the streets, and metal workings showing through the concrete on the sidewalks. All of these pieces share one thing in common, the lines within them. They are all made up them, all in different ways, and all have different tasks. Everything is comprised of lines and it just takes a keen eye to be able to find all of these treasures.

The beginning of this project we started with basic line studies representing balance, progression, and randomness.

From here we combined the line studies to make complex line studies. With these combined line studies we were still required to show the three different ideas of balance, progression, and randomness.

From all of these computer-generated line studies, we hand-manipulated them with photocopiers, scanners, and projectors. At this point we could put the three ideas aside and focus on creating nice curved and diagonal line studies. From these new studies would come the three original ideas again.

From this point in the process, we took all of those generated line studies and we went into the real world of Kansas City and photographed our surroundings. We were supposed to find the line studies we created in the studio out in the real world. I took hundreds of photos over a week in the plaza, crown center, crossroads, business, and river market areas. Of these photos, I was trying to find pre-existing line studies in the community of Kansas City that mimic the line studies that I created in the studio.

 Once we had our pictures we went back into the studio to create our juxtapositions. We started working with matching up line studies with photographs to create successful pairings that went logically together. We worked with mirroring the two, continuation from one into the other, and echoing of the two.

The line studies that I created at the beginning were rather simple, rather minimalistic. This made the creation of the complex line studies harder, as well as finding line studies in the real world harder to capture. In my photos I was focusing on buildings and close-ups of objects along the streets. I wanted to focus on the area of Main Street, and all of the different places and objects you can see in the different districts that are located off of Main Street. This took me everywhere from the Plaza, to the River Market.

Working with the photocopier, scanner, and projector really helped with the curved and diagonal line studies. It made me realize that the computer cannot do everything, like I once thought. It, too, is limited in what it can do. Using hand-generated tools to create these things were very much more successful. Even the hand is more successful in creating nice controlled curves than the computer sometimes.

In my book, I worked with a pattern of ABBABBAAB in that A was a building(or a bigger object) and B was a close-up shot of something located directly on the streets and sidewalks. Within that setup, I also worked with trying to match up densities of blacks, whites, and grays to make it a nice transition on the eyes from image to image and spread to spread.