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EVALUATION

 I started off in this project great. I went to science & industry museum, the Turing memorial, attended a Turing walk & watched a few documentaries on his life as well as reading up about him. However it got to week three & started to go downhill. I wanted to jump straight to final outcomes, rather than to experiment, something that I always seem to.

 After experimenting with the different elements of graphic design, out of communication, illustration & motion I definitely want to go down the route of communication. I have known for a while that illustration wasn’t going to be the pathway for me. I have never really warmed to illustration & I’m not keen on the styles of illustration. But I was unsure between motion & communication. I have a real interest for motion, however I feel my skills & passion are much stronger in communication & in each project I seem to be much more experimental in the communication field than any other. So next year, communication will be the pathway I take.

I am happy with the final outcomes created, especially the cogs image of Turing & my typography, but I would like to create some more imagery that will hopefully be used for the media jam. I feel like in this project I collected a lot of research about Turing for this brief, but yet again I failed to collect enough artist research, experiment as much as I would have liked & my sketchbook looks as empty as always. But I suppose I have made progress from the last two projects & hopefully for the last project I will exceed in all of the briefs criteria’s. 

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THE EGG

Some more images of the Christie Till screen. The images above show how the screens will be divided into five unique input point. Participants will create graphics, moving image and video, interactive works as well as still images all inspired by the theme of Turing & decode/recode. The last images show how the screens will change from one image to an other, whether that be a transition from work to work or from a piece a work to the same piece of work that has been decoded/recoded by another participant.

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ALAN TURING ARTICLE

Come across an article regarding Alan Turing in a magazine the other day. Contains further information about Turing that I didn't know before hand. Below I have typed up what it says.

Lover. Legend. Victim.

On June 23rd 1912, in Maida Vale, London, a boy was born who would go on to become a world legend. He was a man without whom you may not be reading this piece by means of computer technology. Without whom the United Kingdom would possibly have starved during the Second World War, and would certainly have lost many more people at sea.

His name was Alan Mathison Turing.

Even in his early years, his teachers noticed a bright, intelligent young man, hungry for knowledge and nurturing a deep love for and affinity with mathematics. It was this love, this affinity, which would go on to change the world.

In 1926, at the age of 14, Alan went to Sherborne School, a famous independent school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset. His first day of term coincided with the 1926 General Strike in Britain, but so determined was he to start classes that he rode his bicycle unaccompanied more than 60 miles (97 km) from Southampton to school, stopping overnight at an inn. It was at Sherborne that Alan Turing would meet his first love, Christopher Morcom.

Alan and Christopher spent most of the next four years together, until Christopher’s untimely death in 1930 from tuberculosis. This terrible loss not only marked the shattering of Alan’s religious faith and his becoming an atheist, it also sparked a genius for what would become computer technology and artificial intelligence. Desperately longing to hold on to Christopher, he started to wonder about whether it would be possible for a machine to contain the intelligence of a person, and thus his ideas were born.

Alan Turing went on to become a noted mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. His excellence in these fields was duly noted by his home country.

His work at Bletchley Park (also known as Station X) during the Second World War would lead to the creation of the “bombe,” a machine capable of cracking the German Enigma code. This secret code was being used to transmit coordinates for the U-boat bombing of U.K. supply and naval ships. It has been said that this action alone saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. Turing also invented the “Turing test.” The idea was that a computer could be said to “think” if a human interrogator could not tell it apart, through conversation, from a human being. A variation of this test is now used on millions of websites around the world, the CAPTCHA code.

An outspoken, eccentric man, when reporting a burglary, Alan thought nothing of explaining to the police that the young man who had been at his home had been there for sex. It was this revelation that brought the laws of the time to be used against him. He was charged with “gross indecency” in 1952, and was given a choice between a lengthy prison sentence and chemical castration. He chose the latter, and submitted himself to weekly, high-dosage injections of a synthesised female hormone. This ”treatment” killed his male libido, caused his body to grow breasts, and, many say, stopped his ability to think, in the revolutionary and inventive Turing way.

British authorities spied on him and hounded him, and considered him a security risk simply because of his sexuality. Friends that he had met whilst on holidays abroad were stopped from visiting him; his life was no longer his own.

In 1954, only weeks away from his forty-second birthday, Alan Turing was found dead in his home. A half-eaten apple lay on the table beside him. The post mortem revealed that he had died from cyanide poisoning, which, according to the official record, had been administered through the apple.

In fact, the apple was never tested.

2012 is Alan Turing Year, a celebration of all the wonderful inventions he gave to the world and of the centennial anniversary of his birth. Millions across the world will pay tribute to this legend.

So remember: Every time you use a computer, or any gadget that uses the same computer technology, such as your smart phone, you are paying a silent homage to Alan Turing.

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ALAN TURING STATUE

The first time I went to Alan Turing memorial at Sackville Park it was snowing. I captured some beautiful images of the statue, but I thought I would take another trip to take some images when the weather was a bit more brighter.

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ALAN TURING WALK

Last week I attended the Alan Turing - Tortured Genius of the Computer Age Walk, hosted by Manchester Walks, in association with the Manchester Histories Festival. The walk was open to the general public & level 4 graphic design students were all invited. It was a shame that only two other students from the course turned up as it was only a two hour a walk & very informative. However it made it more intimate & I enjoyed myself. I think the walk would have been great if it was at the beginning of the project, but there was nothing that could be done about that. I already knew most of the information that the tour guide told about Alan Turing. But what I found interesting is learning more about the people Turing worked with & also looking at the buildings where he worked & also the building in memory of him.

You can see a few images above taken from the walk above. The Alan Turing building is incredible, the design is unreal. This building is now used for science & maths students, which is very fitting. Another part of the walk which I found interesting was going to the Dancehouse on Oxford Road. It used to be the Regal Cinema, where Turing met the man, who in my opinion, made his life go down hill. The man who blackmailed him, which in a result made Turing go to the police, where then the police found out he was gay. Across the road, which is now the BBC, was where they went for a meal after the cinema. It was strange to think that I was walking on the grounds where Alan Turing had once walked. We ended the walk at the Turing memorial. Over all I nice day out, with the weather to match. Also got given a leaflet, with the information below.

He broke the Nazis’ Enigma code, almost invented the computer, and was persecuted to a painful suicide by the ungrateful authorities. Alan Turing was a tortured genius and became a modern martyr who posthumously received an official government apology from Gordon Brown in 2009.

Sixty years earlier, in 1948, Alan Turing discovered to his chagrin that mathematicians at Manchester University had beaten him into devising the world’s first programmable computer. He contacted the department and had little difficulty convincing them he should be hired, for he had had an excellent war, heavily involved in cracking the supposedly uncrackable codes that the Nazis had encrypted into their Enigma machine.

Turing had been a maths prodigy as a boy. At the age of 14 his first day at Sherborne school had coincided with the 1926 General Strike. So determined was he to attend he biked it 60 miles to the school, stopping overnight at an inn. At school he developed an interest in the latest mathematical philosophies, in particular Bertrand Russell’s paradox: “the set of all tea cups is not a member of itself, but the set of all non-tea cups is”, whose beautiful and simple resonance was so influential in the development of logic as a science.

At Cambridge University Turing developed the idea of a thinking electronic machine but lacked the parts to build one. Manchester had succeeded (found out more on our Oxford Road/University walks) and Turing helped extend the department’s knowledge of primitive computer technology, working in a small brick office on Coupland Street.

It all went wrong for Turing in 1954 when he picked up a boy at the Regal Cinema on Oxford Street (now the Dancehouse Theatre) and took him home. The boy allegedly tried to blackmail Turing, and the mathematician went to the police. When they discovered that there had been a (then illegal) homosexual relationship between the two men they turned the tables on Turing and prosecuted him for gross indecency. His conviction led to the removal of his security clearance at a time of public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents. He was forced to take hormones to “cure” him of his sexual leanings which made him grow breasts, and on 8 June 1954 Turing’s cleaner found him dead. The cause was established as cyanide poisoning.

Did Alan Turing commit suicide, depressed about his career and life being in ruins, or was his death an accident brought on by failing to take care following one of his numerous chemical experiments? A further complication to the drama suggests that Turing was re-creating a scene from his favourite film, Snow White, and that he deliberately executed an ambiguous death to save his mother from too much embarrassment.

Alan Turing was cremated at Woking; his life-size statue occupies pride of place in Sackville Park where we end the tour.

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FINAL OUTCOMES

A collection of my final outcomes for the Alan Turing: Decode/Recode project.

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Poster experiments. Notes to come.

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QUICK RESPONSE

I have now added numbers to my typography.

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QR FONT

Playing around with the font I created, spelling Alan Turing.

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CREATING MY OWN TYPOGRAPHY

Final idea for my font, may tweak around with it a little more yet though. The idea is based around QR codes & pixelation. The font itself is very abstract & probably wouldn't be used for text purposes as a lot is going on & it wouldn't be very legible to the audience. But when creating my own font for this brief I wanted something that would stand out & to have a clear theme.

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ARTIST RESEARCH - CHRISTIAN FAUR

Another artist that uses non typical art materials to create art is Christian Faur. The work created is usually made out of crayons. I like how she has pushed boundaries by not using a typical artistic approach to create her work, it makes you think that art can be created out of anything you wish & can be anything you wish. I'm thinking now maybe I could create the portrait of Alan Turing out of computer parts, braille, apples? Who knows, I shall have a think. Below is a passage I found on Christian Faur's website & found it interesting.

"It is important, for example that we are accustomed to draw with pencil, pen or the like, and that therefore the elements of our representation are strokes and points (in the sense of dots). Had human beings never drawn, but always painted (so that the concept of the contour of shapes did not play a big part), if there were a word in common use, let's call it " line" at which no one thought of a stroke, i.e. of something very thin, but always thought of only the boundary of two colours, and if the the word "point" one never thought of something tiny, but only of the intersections of two colour boundaries, then perhaps much of the development of geometry would not have occurred."

Ludwig Wittgenstein Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Vol. 1) -47

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ARTIST RESEARCH - OSSY PRI HADASH

After creating my pixelated art piece out of colour charts, I was wondering what I other medias I could use to create an image. Just found this artist, Ossy Pri Hadash. This artist mainly uses bottle caps to replicate famous images. Her work is set around a recycle theme & it is quite amazing how an object with another use can be incorporated in to art.

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PIXELATED ART EXPERIMENTATION OUTCOMES

Above shows the outcome of my pixelated art image of Alan Turing. You can just about work out who it is & helps a little if you cross your eyes. I scanned it in to my computer & edited the contrast & brightness settings & also played around with the blur changes so you can see who it is in more detail, but I actually prefer the unedited version. This process really captures the theme of decode & recode. I decoded the original image of Turing & recoded it into something completely different. I would like to experiment more with this process. Maybe by changing the materials I use to create the final piece, rather than colour blocks I used in this one. 

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PIXELATED ART EXPERIMENTATION

After looking at the work of Jean Pierre Yvaral I then went on to look at some pixelation art. After researching these artists I then wanted to have a go at some pixelated art myself. So I took myself to B&Q & got my hands on some colour charts. I got a famous picture of Turing from the internet & split it up in to a grid & I also created a blank grid. I then numbered the colour charts & from the Turing image selected the closet matching colour in each grid. This process was very long & very messy with all the cutting & glueing, but I was quite happy with the end result.

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ARTIST RESEARCH - JEAN PIERRE YVARAL

I have been looking at the artist, Jean Pierre Yvaral a French artist who specialises in kinetic & op-art. He came up with the term numerical art. Numerical art describes how art is programmed according to numerical rules. I like how this theme relates to Alan Turing's morphogenesis theory as well as the theme of numbers used in binary code. Yvaral used computers to process his work & then manipulate, but he would then hand paint all his final images. His work is very abstract & I love the shapes he uses, especially the cubes & pyramids. Even though his work is broken up in to shapes the images are still recognisable. My favourite image is of John F Kennedy, I like the simplicity of the basic colour blocks. I like the idea of breaking an image up & then turning it into something else, yet it still is clear what it is. This process is decoding then recoding an image.