I am proud to say that for once in my DS106 career, I did not procrastinate.
… kind of.
To my own surprise, I started this week’s slew of assignments early, doing some of the lighter work at the library with my girlfriend. Due to me starting ahead of time, I was able to finish the rest of the tasks for the week today (Friday) at 11pm. So I guess I kind of did procrastinate but at the same time I started earlier than usual so the usual repercussions of procrastination didn’t hit me as hard.
The first assignment for this was the reflection post on the videos posted on the course website pertaining to design an storytelling. I made a blog post about the topic that interested me the most; the use of color. I connected the ideas shown in the Vanity Fair video with my own studies of UI/UX development and showed the similarities and differences between the two fields.
Next was the photoblitz, which I decided to tackle inside the confines of my little cubicle study room in the public library. I had to get creative with some of the photo requirements due to the limited space and props I had available, but this was some of the most fun I’ve had with a DS106 assignment as of yet!
The Middlebury College Demystifying AI mini course was my first introduction to AI art production. Previously, I’ve used AI in my coding and asking it for basic tasks, but I’ve never delved into the artistic side of things. I was surprised at the types of images I got back using simple prompts. One of the AI models was spot on with their generation while the other one was a huge miss.
I also completed two other visual and design assignments, and I decided to make both about my course chracter, Hwei. I delved into the design aspect by inverting the colors of one of his profiles, giving him a brighter, more tuned into nature type of look. Think of it as a skin, almost. The other assignment I took was adding a text box to an image of Hwei, where I put a quote that would give more insight into his backstory.
And that just about wraps it up! It was a relatively light week with creative photography and introductions to AI generation, but I thoroughly enjoyed all of the tasks this week. Next week seems to be the heavy hitter with a lot of audio stuff. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared, but I guess it’s time to jump into the world of audio head-first.
This week was all about visual design. While my motivation to keep myself organized wavered, I still managed to get everything done and have some fun while doing it.
I did three daily creates this week: Colour In A Classic, Gif Your First Job, and Theme Song. My favorite was color in a classic. I had so much fun and discovered new paintings. I will be using that website again in the future if I need a break from work. You can find my summary post here.
Next, I also did three assignments. One of them involved testing AI art programs. That made me feel weird, but it was entertaining to see what the AI created. That post is here. I chose to do my next two assignments about my character, Georgia Finch. I used Canva for her business card and Landing for her purse. I enjoyed making her purse and again found a new website!
I also watched and read about book and movie poster design. I found this very interesting and enjoyed explanations for trends I had noticed. My full reflection is here.
I also did the photoblitz. That was the most confusing and stressful task of this week. Anything timed worries me, especially when it involves a new website and challenges that I don’t know how to complete. My full post about that is here.
Overall, I experimented with several new websites this week. My repertoire of digital editing options is rapidly expanding.
A challenge that I faced in the Photoblitz assignment was that I would have liked to be able to use stored photos too, not just ones taken right then, within twenty minutes of time. I have a beautiful moon picture taken on a different day, but this class is helping to take away perfectionism Photoblitz – According to Greta (gretahammen.com). The button that was supposed to copy the html for the page, actually copied a different set of prompts, so I typed the list in the post.
This week was awesome. Real life threw me some curveballs, so I was a little more detached than usual, but I still really enjoyed what we were doing this week. The main objectives this week were to look at visual story telling through images and design and throw the AI twist in there of how it could affect these areas. We were proposed some interesting questions: Is it a photo if it didn’t use a camera? Can we even trust images now? What does AI mean for design? If an AI uses images that were already created, is it copyright? Very important as we delve deeper into digital AI art.
The first thing we looked at were a few posts about design. A few of them went over the work of Chip Kidd who was a book cover designer. His insight into the creativity required for designing a book cover really blew my mind. All the things he was trying to do with them, I did subconsciously because of his design skills. The main quote I take away from this is “It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed — that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed “. This was almost a revelation for me. it got me thinking about how everything is specifically tailored to get a desired reaction through design. There were also a few posts about movie posters and a title sequence. My full thoughts are HERE.
The next item was to do a 20min photo blitz. This was a fun activity because it put pressure on my creativity. What are you going to do when you have to get as many things pumped out as possible in a short amount of time? Will they be garbage? Or will they be better because you had to go off feeling instead of logic? You decide. HERE is my post about it.
Next, we had to do 3 assignments. One was curated and the other two were from the bank. I really enjoyed the AI art tools from the Middlebury College assignment. This was the exercise. The task was to use two tools and generate images using the same prompts and slowly get more elaborate. The results of mine were hilarious. I appreciate that it dove into the question of what this means for artists. I put some thoughts in my post, and I am curious to what you think.
For the other two assignments I chose to do two from the design catalogue. One was called Back to Basics, where I had to design a cottage in an open world videogame. I chose a new one called Palworld where not only can you design a house, but an automated ranch. So, it involves a lot of design planning and coordination and picking the right Pals to help depending on production needs. It’s definitely worth checking out. HERE is my post. The other design challenge was called Contradiction Creation, and its objective was to make a picture that made you feel something, but the words on it contradicted the feeling. These always make me laugh so I did two of them. You can see my post HERE.
I also did 3 daily creates this week. You know what these are so I’m not going to belabor the process. HERE is my post on what I did.
My activity this week was sub-par to say the least. As I am writing this, I have only commented a few times and most of them were on my posts, so I really need to work on visiting the other pages. I will comment on some as the night goes on. I really want to see people’s photoblitz.
So, to conclude this week, I learned a lot about design and the amount of work that goes into making us do and feel things subconsciously. I hope to utilize what I have learned this week in future assignments.
This week was super busy, fun and frustrating as I created art and poetry. Blog writing like a pro will definitely take some practice. I am a work in progress!
To create the 4 Seasons Collage assignment http://4 Seasons Collage – According to Greta (gretahammen.com), I used http://www.unsplash.com for free photos of beaches in different seasons. By copying and pasting the images on a word document, then taking a screenshot, so that I could it get to be in jpeg format and not a document. I then opened it in Paint app and cropped out the unwanted margins.
For the Voynich manuscript Creative Daily, I drew the figures on sketchbook paper, then brushed coffee on it and made the edges ragged with Art Deco scissors https://social.ds106.us/@gretahammen/111808607693545411/embed. Took a photo and uploaded it.
Thursday evening, I edited my movie review of Saturn 3. Dr. Oblivion contributed a conclusion sentence to my review, https://gretahammen.com/ds106/one-too-many-on-saturn-3/ and I gave credit to where credit was due, by adding the producer, author and music composer for the movie,
In the Assignment Bank is a task that combines music and imagery, I had fun combining the Les Misérables theater sign with the sheet music, A Heart full of Love https://gretahammen.com/ds106/music-imagery/. The Les Misérables image is from adobe stock photos and the sheet music is from Pinterest, so that I could “save picture as” in my pictures and use the sheet music for free.
My comments on other’s posts:
Leila’s Corner
This reads much better and is straight to the point, like you said. I love concise communication!
Man, where do I start. This week was so much fun. definitely a lot more fun and interesting than week one. Don’t get me wrong week one was interesting learning about what DS106 was going to be about but this week we got to experiment with so many different assignments and elements of AI.
Assignment Banks
The assignment banks were quite fun for me. I love having the freedom to choose what assignments I can do from each category. The assignments varied within the categories giving me so many options to choose from, making it more fun and interesting. Of course, me being a sports fan I chose all the sports topics. I would have to say my favorite was definitely creating a sports poster for a team. I had fun messing around with an AI generator using different themes and prompts to create what I thought was the perfect poster.
Daily Creates
The daily creates were also fun. Going into it I didn’t really know what to expect and to my surprise I enjoyed each one. The aspect of not knowing what the next day’s topic was created suspense for me. As well as the fact they were random made that more fun for me because you didn’t know what to expect. I was eager to find out what the next day’s topic was. My favorite create was the one where you had to write a poem based on what you saw on a camera view of California. I wasn’t expecting this topic, I had no idea that websites like that existed. It was really cool seeing all the different types of cameras views available. I ended up choosing the camera displaying the Oakland Coliseum. It was so cool seeing the stadium lit up at night with all its fancy lighting. The scenery was majestic you had mountain ranges in the background with small house light up, office buildings lit up, cars passing on the highway, and of course the stadium itself.
Conclusion
Overall, this week was a lot of fun and I thoroughly enjoyed ever last bit of it. From working on the assignment banks to writing daily creates to using Dr. Oblivion to using different types of AIs. I can’t wait for what’s in store for next week. Until next time!
This week has been very interesting getting into making AI generated pictures. I enjoyed using these websites to make these pictures of anything that I type in. I have always enjoyed editing pictures and videos to make cool edits and I have liked being able to use this in school.
Making my character was a lot of fun. Himothy, the character I created, has the ability to make one car per second. He is very good at what he does and will definitely be a money maker.
The assignment bank was awesome. I liked how I was able to pick what I wanted to do. This makes it fun because everyone can choose something that they are interested in making.
Well, you will have noticed there was no week 1 summery. I had a rough start to the semester. Really 2023 was terrible and it has seeped into 2024. I have really enjoyed the daily creates this week and I am really proud of poem I wrote. I paired it with a picture I took in January 2022 when we got a lot of snow and lost power for over 4 days.
#tdc4392
On Monday I completed my 1st visual assignment. I had a lot of fun finding a winter Bob Ross painting and put my children in it. It was so fun showing it to them. They want me to make more. I also started a few other assignments to finish later in the week.
I went to campus earlier than usual to get my parking decal and stuff etc. I was like I will do some homework on campus in the commuter lounge. I need to get headphones. I don’t think the other students would understand or appreciate Dr. Oblivion.
I found developing a character to be difficult at first. Then I decided to model the character off of my sometimes-evil cat. So, with the basic outline of a personality, I then decided to fill in the blanks as it were. It was quite fun and came together rather quickly using the cat as a starting point. If I have the need to make more characters, I luckily have 3 more cats and a dog to use. Lady Alice E Smythe – HURKLE-DURKLING Thoughts for DS106 (hurkledurkling.com)
I decided to use AI to complete a daily create on Thursday. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time making something and since I had never used AI for art before I went with it. It was fun but it took a few tries to come up with something to fit the assignment. I tried out AI again on Friday for the daily create. I had a few ideas for the little poster and new it would take a long time to do. I let AI have a go at it. IT did a good job of putting different scenes together in a pleasing way. The people and animals just looked like mutants or abstract in a bad way. The animals kept looking like they were escaped genetic experiments from a lab. I went with the least scary animal picture for the post. The following is a link to Mastodon where you can see all my daily creates.
I have had a lot of fun getting to know Dr Oblivion. My favorite replies are when he is sarcastic. The Doctor has given me a good laugh many times this week. I have enlisted the help of my children, when possible, with my work. It has been a stressful year for them and getting to help me with homework or art has really boosted moral. They are an opiniated lot and I have to remind them I am the director not them. Sometimes their opinions are quite helpful as is shown in the 10 tips video. It is a short video that is too big to upload to the blog. Short is relative since it is about 4 mins long. I am now trying to figure out what to do. Sadly, the video will not be shared this week. I worked on it all week and while it wasn’t perfect it was my first attempt with editing, and I was proud of it.
I wanted to learn to make a gif this week. It didn’t work out well. I need to find the right software or learn to use it better. I wanted to change the background to a gif and couldn’t figure out how. I will try again next week. making a gif – HURKLE-DURKLING Thoughts for DS106 (hurkledurkling.com)
I made a Pinterest board with having an AI maid or Butler in mind for one of the assignments. It was a little challenging at first coming up with the right words for the search bar.
This week I commented on my fellow students daily creates and read a few blog posts. I didn’t comment on any blog posts this week. I found it easier to comment on daily creates then blog posts.
Well, that’s been my work week for DS106. I will tackle my video problem after a good night’s sleep. I hope I figure out a solution soon.
This week, my main challenge was keeping up with everything we were supposed to do. Organization has always been a weak spot for me, so I created a little to-do list and started checking things off. Every day brought new weather and a new challenge!
First, I did the character assignment. I’ve always loved making characters, so this was a lot of fun for me. One of my friends is also taking this class, so we worked together to make characters with a shared backstory. I even made our characters in the Sims 4 (I played a lot of Sims this week). You can find that post here.
Next, the daily creates. This was typically the first thing I did when I woke up each day. It was a good way to start my morning, even if some of it wasn’t my greatest work.
The three assignments took up the most amount of time. After looking through tons of possible assignments, I chose a photo editing assignment, a writing assignment, and one gif assignment. The writing assignment was probably my favorite as it garnered the funniest results.
I also read The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It was definitely a new read for me, as I’ve never read a manifesto or such a specific opinion on technology. My review can be found here.
I think this week went very well. I feel good about my work and I have gotten more comfortable with WordPress.
What a week. There was a lot more work than the first week for sure. I did not take my advice from last week to start ahead of time and spread out the work, partially because of unexpected circumstances and partially due to other classes suddenly giving a lot of work that I didn’t expect and partially because I am a serial procrastinator.
What got me out of the gutter and back on my ass to run my creative mind again were the daily creates. I knew that I couldn’t procrastinate on these, as they needed to be completed within the posted date. I had lots of fun creating silly poems, collages, and even went hunting on a map for random words in my hometown and making a wacky story about it.
I’ll link to a post with a roundup of all of my daily creates for the week below. I actually got into such a habit of completing these that I ended up doing more than the required amount for the week!
Next order of business was the assignment bank. Just a note on the website UI and content itself, it’s very interesting to see all of these responses and assignments created way back in 2012 and beyond. It’s almost like a memory bank of DS106, and all of the creativity that has gone into the DS106 community over the years. These assignments took a little more creativity and effort but not too much, but I did choose to do relatively easy ones for this first week so it’ll most likely ramp up more in the coming weeks.
This one was a basic text edit over a preexisting photo of an AI robot coding, and I just added 106 into the image to propel DS106 into future relevancy. #4life
This was a fun one! I play this game daily and I never really played around with the creative mode and it was nice to bring in two of my cute dog pets into the frame for a screenshot of the world.
This was my favorite for the week. As I mentioned in my week 1 post, I used to run a Finsta of my own, so it was nice to envision what my favorite Disney character would do if he was an influencer.
Next I edited my blog. To be honest, I’ve always been into minimalist designs, and I often think that the plain yet clean aesthetic is the one that appeals to me the most, even looking at blogs throughout the years. I created various categories that would sort my posts on the right side of my homepage for easier access to my posts, and removed some of the sample prompts and layout to create a clean, no frills look. I swear I actually did some customization! I made the background an ice blue that can hardly be recognized by the human eye, but I swear it was my best attempt to bring in some personality to my otherwise mundane and basic blog. As a future revision, I hope to write an “about me” page and link it at the top somewhere.
Participation is something I could have done a better job with this week. I commented on a few blogs right after finishing my assignments for the week (on Friday), so it definitely wasn’t on my mind to browse throughout the week. Although, this assignment bank post that was done by Tyler was a fun read! It was an assignment where after inserting a birth year, the task is to create a poem with generated words that are relevant to that year within the Merriam-Webster yearly list. Although the assignment was to write a poem, he identified his creation as more of a rap, and it flowed together really nicely! His post inspired me to put some more thought into which types of assignments I can be creative with in the future.
The course character assignment is something I had TOO much fun with this week. I am a huge gamer, and I took this opportunity to take inspiration from one of the newly released champions in League of Legends, Hwei. I took his sinister roots and backstory and turned it into something relevant to AI, keeping his core identity intact in the process while putting my own spin on the character.
It was so cool to link his character to the Artist archetype, as in the game, he is quite literally an artist with a gigantic paintbrush that throws ink of death at the sight of an enemy, acting as the team’s damage dealer and artillery mage. While he doesn’t have these bad-ass abilities in his course character creation version, I decided to focus more on his moral compass and the tragedies of his past that created his skewed viewpoint on the world around him, turning him to AI tools to plot the end of humankind.
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto article was an interesting read. It was essentially a lengthy dissertation about the positives of technology and how it was going to lead us all to the promised land. I didn’t agree with the sentiments, but I did make some thoughtful comparisons to my own opinions and how different it was from my WALL-E review. Dr. Oblivion’s response surprised me the most, as he absolutely agreed with all of my comments. However, this made me feel some sort of eerie way. almost as if I finally realized that Dr. Oblivion, just like any other form of AI, shares no form of common goal with humans for the survival and prosperity of mankind.
Finally for my film review revisions, I made a few revisions to talk more about the deeper AI themes and gained some perspective from Dr. Oblivion. He was mostly agreeing with my points, but that alone was enough for me to strengthen my arguments.
What a crazy week this was, both in and out of DS106. I will make sure to not procrastinate next week, but I said this last week as well, so who knows when I’ll start holding myself accountable
– According to Greta (gretahammen.com)
– According to Greta (gretahammen.com)
– According to Greta (gretahammen.com)
