Metastory: Fashion

I made my way to the general shop today, to get some supplies to clean up my new apartment. I saw around three other men in a span of 8 hours wearing the same outfit as me. They must have chosen the first thing they saw in the getup shop uptown.  I mean, not that there are many other choices to make but it is cool seeing that everyone has the same taste. Last year, the getup store started selling those loose pair of pants and everyone never looked back. It is so easy to put on and easy to run in, no wonder everyone has them.

The women, however, are still dressing the same! they never really surprise me other than the occasional watch some of them wear but I bet it is some page built into the system. It is a scary world but no one wants to admit it, but everyone is aware of it.

Talking about women, I saw a peculiar woman earlier today wearing a scarf. I think she comes from region-5969, further up south where the sand dunes still blow over every spring. It has been awhile since I saw or heard from their inhabitants from that side of the region. The last time I heard about anyone from region-5969, it was a note from my distant uncle, Ren who still possibly has his wife if she had not already gone through the pain of the war. He sent me hand woven scarfs in the mail until i moved to region-9658, I still keep them but my region does not wear it so i shall not. In this time, you do not really want to stand out from the crowds.

Metastory: Authority

I made my way to the local General office to get my lease renewed today. The computers in the place did not give me much problems with the recent update from the city. It concerned me a little because the recent updates took 5 hours longer than the normal 7 hour updating period.

The office clerk looked at me and nodded today, which was pretty nice judging the way everyone has been recently. Sometimes these small gestures really seem to make a difference in your day, but it is not my position to say if it is a good way or a bad way. The authorities never really acknowledged in their annual paper that there is this sort of tension between everyone after the war. They just brush it away thinking that this attitudes would blow over. Everyone’s so nice though but they only show it like the clerk at the general office, a glance or a nod, nothing else.

Metastory: Home

I moved to Region-9658 after my 4-month rental was over in region-9659. My neighbors said there was no use asking the authorities to extend my stay anyway because I did not have anything to do with the government anymore after the Sixth.

The reconstruction in 9658 is comparatively better than that of 9659 because it is closer to the City. I’m not complaining about the livelihood in Region-9658, I just feel like things do not have to be different anymore.

One thing different about the buildings here in 9659 are the bright green buildings that line up the street make my day as the streets are peaceful and wide. They finally took away the trees that sprouted out of nowhere and created this city with huge spaces where I can really breathe and relax from my nights away from the city. Everything has started to follow a certain system and I personally feel that this helps the regions a lot. After everything that went on, and the current depression looming through the streets of each region, It feels good to finally get back some sense of organization and systematicness.

4D Final Sketchup Proj // PROCESS

INSPIRATION FOR MY FINAL WORK.

I wanted to create a setting set in the artist’s Edward hopper’s world where it could reflect on the tension spread throughout the city Region-9658 after the war.

As the time period is a future not too far away from the present, I decided to create a coffee shop that is pretty modern and looks very unassuming at first glance. However, because of this, I would add barricades outside of the shop to act as the only objects outside the shop to create a post-war setting. This is like the red chair seen in the second photo.

Below, is a vintage shot of an alleyway led away from the main streets and there is a restaurant around the curb of the street.

I did not want to create the coffee shop at the curb of the sidewalk as I wanted to elevate the sense of seclusion in the setting made.

This was the closest thing I could find that seems like the setting Hopper has with his paintings. The light naturally streams into the tunnel.

However, I found it difficult to pan through the different buildings with different platforms around them,, therefore, I abandoned this idea. It would have been a great addition to add though.

Inspiration from Edward Hopper’s works

I mainly was inspired by this draft of Edward Hopper’s ‘Night Shadows’ 

From this painting, I was able to appreciate the vastness of the city by this use of intense light and the reluctance to add many or rather ANY details to the setting.

Through this devoid of detail, Hopper was able to create a world where the details did not matter and it streamlined audiences viewpoints to pay their full attention to space and buildings.

I could’ve added extra daunting music in the background… However, there is a certain silence in a typical Hopper image and it does owe largely to an absence of objects or actions that intimate sound. The silence seems charged with some sort of tension. so much so that the tension/tone would relax once any one visible source of sound is added in. Therefore, in order not to be reliant so much on sound and really using the silence to its potential, I chose not to add many objects around the curbs or even in the cafe.To see the light in the painting as intimidating, alienating or

On another hand, To see the light in the painting as intimidating, alienating or dehumanizing, much to popular criticism, is to miss the point: that this light is artificial. It is the light of man’s own devising to overcome the existential darkness, which was Edward Hopper’s New York setting as he was experiencing the time after the great depression.

On one hand, the picture is mundane. On the other, the image powerfully strikes a chord in us – the need for a sanctuary away from the strong light and consuming darkness (from submissions jk).

Working Title/Artist: Night Shadows
Department: Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art
Culture/Period/Location:
HB/TOA Date Code:
Working Date: 1921
photography by mma, Digital File DP221181.tif
retouched by film and media (jnc) 11_24_09

As you can see in the last two photos, the Chiaroscuro used on the paintings really create the setting instead of relying on objects to create the setting. These diagonal offsets of white boxes emphasize on the space and the mood of the seemingly bright colour schemes.

Meta Final project //

[This little story is based on Charmaine’s world – the one with the apps. However, I’m not using any of her characters]

App opened, world out. It’s one of his favorite life philosophies and probably also a name of an app he’s come across before. How problematic is it to be this young and live connected ever so slightly to everything? Lost in a haze of the interwebs and mild concern for his sanity, he startles when Sophie’s hands slammed onto the coffee table.

He looks up and there she is. Tentative, wary, remorseful, determined, and half a dozen other emotions all at once. It takes his breath away. She’s beautiful. Always so beautiful.

‘Luke, why all the screenshots. You’ve been spamming my main feed for days.’ He waits for more words but they don’t come. She remains standing still in front of him, silent and guarded.

Please let her be here to fix this. Please.

‘Ugh, let me look sort out your settings. if not you’d be sending weird snaps and stories to me all day and I won’t be able to send out my daily drawings on my app. Come on, wrist. Please?’

Who knew Artie’s Magic Pencil as a child’s first app could create such a gem. A gem that had so much ingenuity in her she did not even know as it was always confined to that wrist.

Damn that wrist.

And those eyes.

And worn down fingertips that Luke always likened to the topographic prominence of Great Pond Mountain in Maine, USA.

She drops into the empty seat beside him and offers him a shy smile and his heart stutters. He hasn’t smiled himself in weeks, let alone seen hers, and he swears the entire coffee shop can probably hear his health app beaming with irregular heart rate notifications.

‘Luke… what is this.’ She whispers under her breath. ‘Have you been trying to override the main system? The ones will know and you’d be —’

‘I know I know, they’re watching all the time. But I’ve hidden the security vulnerabilities encoded in one of the built-in apps that the ones trust oh-so-dearly as well as some of the screenshots I’ve been spamming you with.’

‘You’ve had the BarefootWorldAtlas as your first app and now you think you can hide from the higher ups? Luke, what exactly are you trying to do with this?’

Luke then goes on trying to explain to Sophie about how he wants her to see what’s beyond her wrist. What the app has shown him, it has not only helped him get exposed to everything around the world, virtual or not. It has made him want to go beyond the codes and icons. What he has been doing all this while was to perhaps find a loophole in the system, to get past the one’s watch and let the both of them really get to know themselves, each other and the grounds of which they live off of.

“I tried everything and I just couldn’t. I’m not good with codes and I never have been. But you still deserve the freedom beyond that thing we have on us. And I just…here’s the evidence of all of my attempts. I know, maybe I’m just foolish to believe we can get out there and go beyond.. this. Look I’m sorry for bringing you into my little hope and dreams for something more. But right now I’m more sorry than a simple apology is capable of communicating.”

“Not good with codes? That sounded pretty good to me, encoder.” He nods his head in acceptance and the cloud of tension hovering above their heads bursts into raindrops of relief and hope. She’s already forgiven him and they both know it.

“You were saying you created a landscape vector for me,” he reminds her with a grin. Grudge holding has never been her style and the fact that she’s finally here with him, with his heart on his sleeve, means the world to her and more.

“About that…you should maybe probably actually not seen all of that. It’s really bad. I wanted you to have them on the principles of Art and Design, but it’s all pretty terrible.”

He opens dropbox and opens up a bright orange folder and laughs in agreement, amusement coloring his voice. “Is this a layout? I don’t even think you got the arrangement of layers right.”

She smacks his hand lightly with his empty coffee cup and laughs with him, thankfulness shining in her wet, brown eyes.

He reaches for her hand the same moment she extends it and then everything else fades leaving just them: safe behind the shield of his enduring forgiveness and radical empathy.

HOME: progress 1

‘Richard, that was a close shave if we haven’t followed the protocol she would’ve followed you. Please never EVER do that again?’

Richard pushed his hair back, heaved a sigh and fell back into his chair before checking on his stats.

The room fell into silence once again as the faction stared at the stone wall. On the stone wall, a projection of Tammy showed her staring at the space in front of her bed.

 

‘Why does Pa always think that I’m such an ______ whenever I am not with him? What did i do so wrong

Fanfiction // Research

 

For my fanfiction, I am very inspired by Edward Hopper’s individual rendition of New York. He allows us to be captivated by his vividly colored buildings but also shrouded in mystery due to his use of setting.

Image result for edward hopper's world

Automat print, 1927, by Edward Hopper.

He creates this world from his own where he deploys the simplest devices of Art, reduction. This is where he strips a place of its details but leaves the minimum to act as if it is a clue to the audience.

But I thought, why not make it to a reality?

In our current day and age where war is largely prevalent due to the dense delegation of global responsibility to one of the world’s most conceited boss… We take for granted the many possessions we have until all is lost.

I present to you Region-9658, a time set in the future but not too far away from our own. We are not in a post-apocalyptic world, living under ruins and beside dead bodies. We have rather recovered from the losses from the recent Sixth world war and we are doing fine.

Our main character in this story is Finley, he has been living each day peacefully after the sixth world war. Depression falls onto Region-9658 (which is inevitable after the war trauma), everyone is silent, everyone is sparse and keeps to their own devices. Everywhere you turn, they talk minimally and they smile or have a slight nod to acknowledge your huge presence, as there are not many people in the room other than yourself. Everyone and everything is so mundane you kinda get the hang of things, everyone is so eh, meh. you don’t want to stand out to break the silence.