Link to my new Weebly site

https://pjcommunication.weebly.com

Lori Hubbard-Welsh, I hope you view this

Maurice Bennett: The Toastman

For my media arts class, I've stumbled on a webpage of a very interesting artist known as Maurice Bennett. He's said to be one of the most famous artists of New Zealand and for a very good reason. Bennett is best known for making art made out of toast. Yes, toast. Check out his artwork of our former President Barry.

The key to Bennett's impressive toast art is the alignment of the toast. Not only does he need to align the different slices to get the shape of his art, but the toast needs to different colors to get the shading, and color for recognizability. The way the toast is neatly aligned can also be an applicant for the aesthetic usability effect. As an artist, you want your work to look aesthetically pleasing and give off a positive attitude that'll make the viewers be able to tolerate and accept your work. Aesthetic usability can help develop positive relations and catalyze your creative thinking.

This man here, is Gareth Edwards, one of the greatest rugby players of all time.

How is it up close, Bennett's most well-known works look like a ton of toast laid out together but from afar, they actually look less like toast and more like very detailed pixelated art? The key to Bennett's amazing toast art is with the technique of closure which helps perceive a set of individual elements as a single recognizable pattern.

Here's a more simple simple one, which Bennett (The shorter man standing to the right of his artwork) used to commemorate Beervana. As you can see, due to the closure, the individual slices of toast come together to make one big picture.

Bennett's work has somewhat of an exposure effect that helps expose stimuli and increase likelihood and popularity on the product. Take for example, his work of the Mona Lisa holding an ice cream cone (which is featured in a mall in Hong Kong)

The exposure effect at it's finest. Taking one of the most classical and famous portraits in the history of the universe and adding a cute twist to it with Lisa holding a tasty strawberry ice cream cone that obviously didn't exist during Da Vinci's lifetime. It also seems to rely on the classic "nudge" technique, which is a method for predicting behavior without restricting and significantly changing incentives. Looking at this picture won't change your life but maybe just looking at it might tempt you to get some ice cream right about now...

Speaking of the nudge method, the fact that Maurice Bennett makes his artwork out of toast might also encourage you to eat more toast.

To end things off, here's my favorite work of Bennett's which isn't even toast art. It's 5040 M&Ms coming together to make a portrait of the rapper Eminem.

Stanford's Crash Course in Design

Last week on September 10, 2018, my MADT102 class participated in an activity called "Stanford's Crash Course in Design." What it basically came down to is this: Our instructor Lori made us do arts and crafts. That's right, doing arts and crafts in college! And apparently this comes from Stanford, a rich school full of rich students who graduated in the top 5% of their high school class. What we did first was pair up with a student and tell them a story of a time they offered someone else a gift. Then the other person thought of an alternate situation where something different happened. This was the part that felt most natural to me because I enjoy socializing and talking with others. If only I knew the people on campus better!
My partner was a junior named Matt Bow. Matt told me the story of when he was at his hometown of Santa Cruz Christmas 2017 when he and a friend of his made a table from scratch to use to play drinking games. I told Matt a story from Christmas 2013 when I gave my then 14-year-old cousin GTA V. Our alternate tellings came down to this: Instead of building a table, Matt and his friend were camping on the beach, and instead of giving my cousin GTA V for Christmas, we lit up fireworks together for some reason.
The purpose of this was to create a model of anything featured in our made up stories. Matt decided to make a rocket, while I made a tent. However, as soon as we got to getting our accessories to make our models, this is when I felt uncomfortable. We had many things to work with, from multicolored sheets of paper, aluminum foil, many markers, post-it notes, stickers, you name it. The thing is, I'm no artist. I wish I could draw well. I definitely would call myself a visionary. If I did have a talent for drawing I could create some amazing, unique and detailed stuff. But that's only in a parallel universe where I have artistic merit and see beauty in everything.

Here is the amazing rocket that Matt made using his spare soda can that he brought with to class:

He even used a marker as the thing at the end that sets it off!

By comparison, here is my shoddily made tent that is just three post-it notes glued together:

Wow. Just wow. An autistic 12 year old on Deviant art could make something on MS Paint with twice the effort as this right here.

Perhaps I could've put in more effort. I mean, I tried to cut out a doorway for the tent but found out that I had too much trouble sticking it together with glue. Maybe I was held back by time pressure. As all the other students were building their stuff with simple arts and crafts tools like they were 2nd graders, I was sitting there confused thinking "What should I do?" or "Why are we doing this?" or "Is this why I enrolled in this class?" I will admit, I was not prepared for something like this and when I was hit with it, I couldn't figure out how to deal with it. But at least I did find a way, even if it was the bare minimum. At least my classmates complemented my tent, but probably because they didn't want to make me feel bad. Or more likely, they were impressed how little effort it took to make what I made.

Luckily, these were just prototypes, so I guess there was a reason why they liked it so far. It's clearly still unfinished but if I knew that I was going to expand on it in the future, I probably would've asked other people what I could do to improve my work to make it look like it had effort put into it. Based off of what I've learned in this little activity, I feel as if my next step would be to expand on it. Since my post-it note tent is only a miniature prototype, I'd probably make a slightly larger version using colored paper sheets and use toothpicks to support it. Maybe I'd attack something like yarn to use as the tent entrance. If we get to work on these again next class, I'll be sure to do it again soon!

As a bonus, here are all the crafts the class made that night!