February 2022
Subject: COVID19 Collage
Media: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects
For this assignment, we were asked to explore and develop augmented reality experiences with the ideals of Dadaism in mind. Dadaism is not set by a specific style as artists rejected the whole idea of direction. We were asked to immerse ourselves within the representation and ideals of Dada in order to have inspiration and a clear idea of what we could create. Once we had an art piece created, we are to develop an augmented reality composition that could go overtop of the original piece to present to viewers.
For my first work of art, I decided to develop one of the more common art forms within the Dada movement – a collage. I wanted to create a collage based on the COVID-19 pandemic that has been ongoing since 2020, and how it has really taken a toll on society.
At first glance, viewers can notice the many colors, the bacteria in the background and the man in the foreground. The bacteria in the background represent the COVID-19 bacteria responsible for the ongoing pandemic. I felt that this image would be meaningful with the overall composition and design due to it being the focus of the art piece. The man in the foreground is Edward Jenner, the first physician to develop a vaccine. The vaccine he developed was for the smallpox virus and the syringe in the image is sourced as his personal syringe for these vaccines. With Edward Jenner developing the first vaccine, we wouldn’t be protected from deadly diseases and viruses. His representation in this art piece is symbolic to the vaccinations required for the COVID-19 virus. I sourced an older looking lung function poster to represent how COVID-19 is respiratory based and is the root for the many troubles that the virus causes for individuals. I sourced a poster online of letters from a magazine and cropped each letter to organize on this composition. With this look, I wanted to represent the way a collage is made using various materials and how freely materials are organized. The graph located at the bottom of the composition represents the rise of COVID-19 cases throughout 2020 and 2021 and the many challenges it has created. I made changes to the shapes in the background as I wanted them to symbolize bacteria in an abstract way. i also added the lungs and a breathing sound effect in the background to make it pop and catch attention to viewers. The colors of the background are used to make Edward Jenner stand out and to create a visually appealing composition. Many of the colors are shown with lower opacity to make them more subtle in the background. For most of the images in this artwork, I used the Photoshop tool “Mask and Select”. This tool allowed me to source my selected target and remove the background, while creating a mask over the selected subject. Once this composition was finished, I uploaded it into Adobe After Effects and began creating motion graphic features. For the motion graphics, I added a mask to Edward Jenner’s face as a symbol of concealing the face through the mandatory mandate issued by the government. A cage appears just below the lung function poster, and it is used to represent how many individuals have felt trapped throughout this pandemic and the emotions of not being let go. The moving bubbles, created by the scale tool, are used to represent the growing and mutating properties of the variants of the COVID-19 virus.
This augmented reality piece can be viewed using Artivive using the convenient app at https://bridge.artivive.com/#!/
