About

CRYST CAST
ART 499 Project
Spring 2015
Lanzi



WHY: As a Y Gen, I’ve always been taught that creatively, we are living during a time where remixing is king. The technological developments in the last decade have allowed for digital/creative processes to flourish faster than ever before. We also live in a time of hypermedia: constant news, ads, art, films, indie socio-economic documentaries, tweets, YouTube comment fights, and the worst of all: fan fictions - are being developed literally by the minute. Time, by this standard, is money and a chance for someone to get themselves noticed for that minute. With the internet, Macs, iPhones, iPads, (PCs...), Adobe, creative Steam vendors, apps, Wacom, printers that can now do everything your heart desires - as long as you have the skills. Design today is better. Movies are better. Coding languages are significantly better (Thank God). Along with these, you have to be better. There has been a pressure I’ve felt, since I was very young, to learn everything I can about computer tech / production, though a majority of the adults and early influencers in my life did not have the proper skills/background to aid me educationally. I chose the New Media Production major at the University of Tampa to gain a solid background on how creative media is developed and what it’s applications are - I can confidently say that NMP was by far the most difficult and eye opening experience I’ve had so far. I absolutely recieved an education worth the long hours and hair pulling - so much so, that I may not make one new piece of glitch art, remix, or touch my MAC for a month after graduation. In the past few months, however, I’ve become tired of having to remix, to try to connect with other creatives on social media, and to impress others who may not be so accepting (ahem, Evewright). I decided to use my ART 499 project, Cryst Cast, as a creative outlet to experiment and play with new media apps and digital tools, separate from any inspiration based on pop-culture, social media, current events, or other real life event. I simply wanted to enjoy the process of creating art and designs.

HOW: Cryst Cast for ART 499 was conceived and developed over a period of 1 1/2 years. Without much prior experience using digital tools for creative art or design, and unfortunately having an unqualified beginning digital arts professor, I had to teach myself how to use various Adobe and online programs. Luckily, in the past decade, creative apps have been rolling out into the Apple, Google Play, and Steam stores. I took the opportunity to research and experiment with multiple applications for creating art, graphic designs, music, and films. The applications and programs used to create the work used in Cryst Cast include mainly Adobe programs Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Draw, for Mac and iPad, Paper by 53, DMesh, Sketchbook, Autodesk, Design Tools, and other applications which made the creative process ever-evolving, experimental, and fun. The whole year of 2014 was spent learning about various apps and how I would be able to utilize my favorite tools and combine them to create unique pieces of art. After an art project in Art and Tech with D’Alessandro, I decided that working with a grid system was the best way to keep my art organized and aligned. Combining a grid, geometric objects (usually exported from DMesh or Illustrator), and an inspirational color board or photograph, I have been able to create dozens of art pieces - some good, others neatly filed away until I have the time to further edit them.
ORIGINALLY, at the beginning of the Spring 2015 semester, I decided it was time to make the shift to creating more complex and realistic pieces for ART 499 and my portfolio. I began working on week-long projects that involved me recreating figures from pop-culture. I don’t consider myself a die-hard fan of any shows, musicians, or public figures, but I chose Game of Thrones since it is extremely popular right now. My thought was that I could hopefully, eventually gain online recognition from sites like Behance, Facebook, or Buzzfeed. I created many pieces that I’m proud of, and I enjoyed finally watching the GoT series as I worked, but something felt wrong about the project and stressed me out. I was creating the pieces to pass ART 499 of course, but doing all of that work just to potentially impress other people didn’t sit right with me. In some ways, I think of the GoT series as a mistake. Yes, people are always remixing popular things and getting noticed for doing so, and that’s awesome for them, but I am at a point, creatively, where I want to keep experimenting and developing better techniques for art that is for myself and not solely for others.

MEANING: The entire Cryst Cast series is a mix of different color schemes, ideas, shapes, yet the aesthetic and passion I have for the series ties it all together. It is a mix of different techniques to achieve relatively the same aesthetic result using triangular shapes to create the images, some of which are abstract and some which I’ve attempted the likeness of an object or person. When I first started creating images with the triangle shapes, I was only doing it for fun and listened to Crystal Castles the entire time I’d be creating images. I named the series after the band in a way, but it is alo named Cryst Cast also because I noticed in the past half year that my favorite images looked like crystals. The three pieces I entered into the BFA Exit show are my favorite pieces so far, however, I lost those exact three digital files this week when my computer crashed (the only three I was editing and took off my hardrive). I am going to reconstruct those images and continue with the rest of the series, based on those images. I may start ommitting a large portion of the previous experimental work I’ve done in order to have a more cohesive series, then break into other series with the leftovers. For now, I am happy with the style I’ve developed and will continue with it. I would love to break into installations and other mediums with the Cryst Cast aesthetic, and will be pursuing this as well after graduation - when I have a job money to spend on art supplies. The most important thing I’ve learned from creating this series, aside from all of the absurdly useful classes I’ve taken at UT just to create it, it’s that the most important person to please, after your professor or employer, is yourself. I’m doing that now, and I’m pretty happy with how everything is turning out. I like to go back into my work all the time and change or make corrections to it - I know none of my work is perfect, and I lso don’t think that any of it is ever completely finished. My work for the Cryst Cast series is an ongoing process that I want to keep building on. In a way, my work is like making a mandala - which is probably why I loved the mandala project from ART 310 so much. The focus and calmness I feel when creating artwork for this series is like meditation.