Week 14: Scratch

I have really enjoyed working with Scratch this week. After trying out a few different things, I ended up creating this fun interactive animation that I would like to share.

One can try out the animation here.

Because playing with Scratch was new to me, I felt excited and empowered by it's capabilities. It reminded me of how I felt while working with circuits. There is something special about having your hand is something that you didn't think you were capable of. Although at first I was a bit confused, I quickly caught on with the help of the tutorials on the Scratch website and was able to customize some of their ideas to be my own.

I can see students feeling this same sense of empowerment while using the software. I love that this is something they could learn in the classroom, but also do at home for free. I think it would be interesting to see how students might customize their animations or games and what images they might choose or create. I think this teaches excellent problem solving skills. I can see this as something every student could get excited about, even ones who are not as interested in traditional art materials or even art in general.

While researching other artists who use code to create art, I was at first perplexed by what that could mean. However, I ended up spending a lot of time checking out different websites and videos and am realizing that some of my favorite things I've seen in museums or galleries have involved code and I hadn't made that connection until now.

I would like to share some work by the artist Zach Lieberman. Lieberman is artist and developer. He has a fine art background of painting and printmaking but was always fascinated by animation and the idea of bringing something to life. Using code, he is able to do just that.

About his process he says, "one of my responsibilities is to get myself into trouble, and then the act of making the work is getting yourself out of trouble."

He describes code as it is like poetry, "the right words in the right order."

The following is an example of his work called Reface: Portrait Sequencer.
A video of the work in action can be seen here.
Reface: Portrait Sequencer is a surreal video masher based on the exquisite corpse. Using its camera is composes endless combinations of the faces of it’s viewers. It records brief video clips of it’s viewers mouths, eyes, and foreheads, and mixes them together.

A sequel to a previous lesson:
A few weeks ago I listed a few ideas about lessons which incorporated design. One of them was to sketch out their ideal backpack, lunch box, water bottle, etc. The second part of this would be to make the product from found materials. This could lead to a "social justice" lesson about sustainability. Or students could take images of their product and use scratch to make an animated advertisement for it. It would be interesting to see students use scratch to animate some of their drawings, paintings, or sculptures they have made in class previously.