Digital Art

Augmented Photos

Photographs from my camera roll that have been graded, photobashed, or augmented with rendered objects.

Yangjing Nighthawks

“Yangjing Nighthawks“ (after Edward Hopper). Photographed at night on Lingshang Road, Pudong, Shanghai, in 2022. Local color corrections in Lightroom.

Fearless on the Bund

“Bund Bull Meets Fearless Girl”. Photographed in May, 2022.

The “Bund Bull,” on the Western bank of Shanghai’s Bund, is based on Arturo Di Monica’s Charging Bull on Wall Street. In this re-imagining in homage, Kristen Visbal’s Fearless Girl appears to either enter into dialogue with, or to confront, the Bund bull.

“No Signal”

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” ― William Gibson, Neuromancer Photographed at the largest port in the world, the Port of Shanghai, in May 2021.

Calvin Klein Bottle

“Nothing is on the other side of my Calvin” Photographed at home in Shanghai. Augmented with Shapr3D, Procreate, and iOS Darkroom.

I was disappointed to discover that, although there is a “(Calvin) Klein bottle”, it is a simple tubular water bottle. This image rectifies the omission.

Remixes

The Sun of Man

“The Sun of Man (Eclipse)”. Remixed of Magritte “Son of Man” with NASA images.

Detailed images of celestial bodies are the epitome of realism (the source utterly untouched by humans), but they are also inherently fantastical, encompassing features alien to ancestral understanding, and enabled only by technology. This piece updates the Magritte painting, using its fantastical elements to bring out this feature of the astrophotographic images, but also to highlight a metaphor that is at most implicit in the original.

Laughter and Sorrow in the Age of COVID

Modified from a Wikipedia image published under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license

This work in progress is an exploration of the extent to which face masks hide facial expressions. I found that during the first months of the pandemic (1) it was very clear to me when other people were smiling, and (2) I became especially aware of the use of my own eyes and cheeks to convey expression. I wanted to illustrate the availability of smiling through (or, above) a mask, by decorating the traditional comedy and tragedy masks (aka “theater masks”, aka “Sock and Buskin”, aka “Thalia and Melpomene”) to show the emotion in the eyes and upper face, instead of the mouth. Interestingly, only a smile that involves the upper face (the orbicularis oculi muscle) is an honest smile. It is a “Duchenne smile”, that is produced by genuine emotion. (The zygomatic major muscle, which only raises the corners of the mouth, is shared by both the Duchenne smile and the non-Duchenne, or “Botox”, smile.) So the smile that is visible in the presence of a mask is the true smile — the mask doesn’t make it more difficult to express (this) emotion, but it does make it more difficult to show a polite smile for show.

Design Fictions

A series of pieces that use synthetic imagery and design fiction to examine alternative retro-futures. These use specific points in the past, and the images and image techniques from those times, as a point of departure.

Greenfield Development

“Greenfield Development”

My U.S. residence, Greenfield Massachusetts, is a former tool-and-die company town that is now, at 17,768 people, the largest and only city in its county and the smallest city in the state. This piece is in conversation with an early-twentieth-century illustration that speculates about what it might look in the year 2000. The title is a wordplay on the actual name of the town, and the term “greenfield development”, which in technology R&D is used to mean ab initio creation, as opposed to the improvement of existing technology structures. This sense is similar to, but not the same as, the technical meaning of the same phrase in the fields of real estate and planning; here, the difference is crucial.

Robot Uprising

A design fiction work in progress.

The Organic Growth of the Shanghai Skyline

The construction of the Lujiazui skyline was an intense transformation that heralded a period of rapid reconstruction. In this reimagining, it evolved organically over the centuries as a slow and natural transformation of existing architectural elements and construction techniques, and was recorded at various points by artists and documentarians using the styles and technologies of their times.