Thomas Curtis’s Automatic Biography

First things first I wish to welcome you to this experience which we shall enjoy together. To make things interesting for myself, this will be my first and only draft. I’m awful at praising or acknowledging my own personal skills and achievements but I have so much of both that it balances out. Let’s begin:

A few things to note about me, my name is Thomas, I’m a CS major and IMGD minor, and anything that I write about myself further is probably subject to change. I like to enjoy film, games, and books in that order, and my biggest fear is tied between immortality and dying. 

Now, I’d like to show my photography. Most of which is available through my instagram found here: https://www.instagram.com/thomascurtis526/

I got into photography at first because I liked the idea of pursuing art that held beauty through observation. Instead of painstakingly recreating a moment or a feeling through traditional artwork, I just needed to take my camera out and capture it in the moment which to me is a lot more rewarding. That’s what my early stuff like this was all about.
Later I realized that photography is best coupled with a sense of discovery, as most of my favorite pictures are just me playing with an idea or perspective with a subject that may be overlooked by most. For example this picture:

Was taken in a moment after someone had spilled their drink onto a key-chain. In that moment a mess became a snack of colors and contrast. I think that’s pretty neat. 

Nowadays, after forgetting about photography for a while, I will occasionally take photos just because a moment strikes me. It’s like a spiritual thing and hard to explain. This is my most recent picture and I think I like it the most, but I don’t really know why. 

(All these pictures look bad after uploading them since I needed to take screenshots. Just go to my instagram to see the high-quality versions, and remember to follow, like, share, and donate to my patreon.)

Anyway, I’m not really a photographer. That’s just a hobby that happens to be something I have a lot of media for. My main artistic goal in life is to create games for people to play and enjoy. I have all of my past IMGD projects on a WPI web server here: http://users.wpi.edu/~tcurtis/games/

These games are mainly just simple applets built in very simple game design engines. Two are made in game-maker and the rest in Perlenspiel. The two games that make me think of this class the most are the sequencer, and Time is Money. 

The Sequencer was a toy that I made for a digital game design one that allows players to create music by painting on a grid. 

Based on the first lecture we had, organic music creation is something that will probably be a focus. It reminded me of this.

Time is Money was my most recent work. It involved a story that switched between the gameplay of a convenience store and a action shoot-em-up. The mix of two different games together reminded me of the mix of different mediums that was talked about in class.

So yeah, that’s about it. My artistic goals right now are in flux because art is about emotional expression and I haven’t had an emotion in like 3 months so gimme a bit to cry or something. 

One Comment Add yours

  1. Thanks for sharing about yourself even though you don’t really like to. I hope this course provides some new forms of self expression.

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