Hi folks. I’m Colin, a senior ME undergrad. I’m originally from a boring part of Connecticut. I’ve always had a passion for art, it’s something that has filled my free time since middle school. I did my humanities concentration in art and after doing an IQP on interactive museum exhibits, I’m taking this course to learn more about interactive medias and the tools that power them.

My art experience is primarily digital, working on web graphics, posters, and rendered environments. The tools I use a lot are Photoshop, After Effects, and 3d model packages like 3ds Max.

On the Photoshop side, my recent works have been banners and posters for the WWPI Radio here on campus! (Our GBM is this Tuesday, 7pm in SL 104 and you should come!)

I did my humanities practicum in Visual Persuasion, where my focus there was to find new ways of “Visualizing Audio” through a collection of digital compositions. My goal was to create additional methods to experience and view audio by extending the sense of sound into visual spaces.
Of my two major pieces, one was a 3D model environment that loosely resembled a mountain range, generated directly from the audio spectrum of a nature recording near a mountain.

The final practicum piece was a rendering of a 3D wire-frame tunnel in After Effects, where scene lighting and geometry deflections were controlled by certain audio frequencies of a song. This one required many hours of rendering -_-. Below is the poster-version of it, however it makes a lot more sense in it’s video format.

On the more technical side, I have a basic understanding of coding from programing basic robot in high school, G&M code (CNC Machine language), and some exploring programs like Processing. I don’t have much experience in arduinos, and that’s something I’m looking forward to learning this term.

In addition, I also work on Audio-arts, being electronic music composition, focusing recently on retro video game music (i.e. chiptune). Older music softwares use a different audio workstation called a “Tracker”, which basically looks like excel and you type in all the notes, (it’s as fun as it sounds, but has it’s benefits). Below is an example of a cover I did of a VGM.

https://www.youtube (dot) com/watch?v=z1Z_nfkW138

My inspirations are a combination of visual and music arts (explaining why I’m somewhere in the middle). To name drop a few artists I look up to: Simon Stålenhag (both his art and music), Jack Stauber, and the Deskpop music label (experimental electronic music).
Art is a medium that helps me communicate things that are words can’t. My goals are to try something new every time I take on a new project and see what new/weird methods I can learn along the way.