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Rick Shepardson

How can you play with ones and zeros? As children we built relationships with our creative mediums, learning how finger paints and clay dough worked by spreading them from our fingertips and rolling them between our palms. I once pinched a piece of rolled up clay between my fingers and realized I had the dorsal fin of a fish. Imagine if we could learn the nuances of digital video the same way?

Attendee Benefits

My presentation chronicles methods I rely on which allow students to explore the digital image by hand. Adventures in Flatland, The Phantasmagoria, and Collaborations with Ghosts create digital images by manipulating objects in three-dimensional space. These techniques alleviate the adversarial "who's in charge here" relationships often initiated between digital tools and new users. Furthermore, they dissolve the ego and help students break free of overly prescriptive compositional guides like the rule of thirds and golden rectangle." My presentation offers attendees a variety of new techniques to create digital images. It will also offer attendees a process by which to analyze their experimentations with these techniques and incorporate them into increasingly robust and more methodical projects. Handouts I provide will offer step by step instructions to initiate these experiments. Ultimately, this presentation will offer a new method of studying the nuances of digital imaging tools that should benefit attendees as both creators and mentors.