New Website: Emily Ginsburg, Artist

Much has been going on… I’ve been working on an iPad development project (more on that when information is public), multiple websites, and teaching animation for the Summer at Cornish teen program.

Emily Ginsburg's "Dance Card: From Waking to Sleeping"

Recently launched is a new site I developed for an artist, Emily Ginsburg http://www.emilyginsburg.com.

Her work merges print making and installation, 2-dimensional information graphics with sculptural objects with a respect for patterns. Much of her work looks to reference the patterns of daily life with which many people can associate to their own.

In her project, Dance Card: From Waking to Sleeping, she presents the rituals of the everyday (activities such as making breakfast, checking email, grocery shopping, etc.) on classically styled dance cards. They have the effect of creating a map of the mundane patterns of life and commonplace actions.

She takes patterns to a very literal sense in Blotto, making wallpaper from images presented like Rorschach ink blots. Through the masking and mirroring of the images, their meaning becomes extra subjective to the viewer’s frame of reference.

I did a complete design overhaul on her site which was based in Flash. Transitioning this site into HTML and Javascript, it was a good time to implement a new custom content management system (CMS) that I’m developing as a platform that caters specifically to the needs of visual artists who have conceptual backing to their work.

Interview by author, Laura Stanfill

Novelist, Laura Stanfill has been posting an interview series titled “7-Questions,” where she asks fellow writers and artists about their creative process. She has honored me with my very own interview.  In the interview, we discuss how Muddy Paws relates to my art practice, and what part technology plays in my art.

You can read the full interview on Laura Stanfill’s blog.

City Arts shows the Crib

Ellen and I showed our home  a few weeks ago to Rachel Gallagher and Alex Hayden (photographer) for an article in City Arts Magazine about artist’s residences. We love our apartment, and are happy to show it. They came on a very overcast day, though I couldn’t tell by looking at the photos. City Arts is a free printed magazine found in many cool places around Seattle.

photos by Alex Hayden for City Arts Magazine

On Gaming

Muddy Paws the game icon.Wow, it has been awhile since I’ve posted here. I have been quite busy working on a new game for iPhone and iPod Touch, Muddy Paws. A video game? Yes.

How does this relate to art? Well, I’ll give a greater explanation in a future post. For now, I’m interested in the correlation of art as experience and game as an experience. And this game is my first publicly available iPhone app.

Check it out here!

Best of 2010, Seattle Magazine

Ice-Rage Game by Jacob Fennell and Students, Cornish College of the ArtsI was a proud faculty member of this program this last summer. I taught both Game Design, and Animation. My students made some impressive work. The following excerpt is from  Seattle Magazine.

Coolest summer camp for teens
Cornish College has become a mecca for teenage artist wannabes, thanks to a fantastic summer program that was expanded this year and gave 340 youngsters a taste of life in art college. In addition to being immersed in the local arts scene, participants got to take studio classes with big-name Seattle artists, such as comic illustrator Ellen Forney and life drawing artist Jeffry Mitchell. The students came from all over the country and even overseas, a testament to Cornish’s reputation. Sign-ups for the 2011 summer session begin in January; visit cornish.edu/summer.

In the Animation class, the students learned various animation techniques including cel-shaded, stop-motion, and Flash. They worked both together and separately on projects. Each student’s work culminated in a 15-30 second animation using their own stories.

The Game Design class learned a lot about motivations for game players, balancing game play, and creating experiences and player interactions. We produced a very playable board game called Ice Rage. The object of the game was to be the last dinosaur herd to survive the Ice Age by competing and negotiating with each other for land and water resources.

We Are Legion – Halloween Special

Costumed hoards scroll by sped along by your mouse cursor.I hope your Halloween costume plans are in order. Check out Stephen Slappe’s We Are Legion, a project completed for the Time-Based Art Festival. Besides being an RAWKin’ piece and Halloween themed, I was responsible for the application programming end of it (AS3, PHP, and Photoshop Actions) and UI design.

From the TBA:09 catalog:

Stephen Slappe creates a never-ending army of costumed youth in a web project that mines your photo albums for evidence of what the artist calls ‘contemporary cultural indoctrination.’ For TBA, Slappe will set up stations, online and in person, in order to collect images of you and yours in Halloween garb. He will string these images together into a scrolling defense line of masked society. We Are Legion addresses personal history and pop culture nostalgia, and plays with the technological innovations that allow for rapid sharing of personal images. Slappe’s work blends humor, absurdity, and anxiety in order to reflect upon notions of home, transience, and physical and psychological escape.

For We Are Legion, I created an application which takes the images that have been accepted, and composites their cutouts against a constantly scrolling background controlled by the user’s mouse position. The images are lassoed in Photoshop, and custom script cuts out the image and creates two image files one of which is a black and white mask which is uploaded to the server.

New Work for Passages at INSCAPE

INSCAPE show card, front side
I am proud to be joining many other artists in creating a building size exhibition of art installations and performances. Please join us for Passages at Inscape

October 16: 12Noon – Midnight
October 17: 12Noon – 6PM
815 Airport Way South : Map

On October 16 th and 17 th , 2010 come down to celebrate the rechristening of the old INS building as an arts and culture hub in Seattle.

For the first time since its opening in 1932, you can tour the different areas of the building that formerly housed the Immigration and Naturalization Services as well as the Federal Assay Offices. Visit the studios of some of the artists who are beginning to get to work here. Check out Passages , an inaugural series of artistic investigations and interventions, exploring the past history and the future possibility of the building.

Get a guided tour of the building by folks who engaged with the INS directly and hear their stories woven together with the building facts to create a living history of the INS.

Stay for the evening performances on Saturday Oct 16 th by Gargle Blasters, Ashcomb, Phase 3 and Prints of China. Eat something, drink something and most importantly help us mark the transition of this amazing space.

Conceptual Concerns for the New Media Artist

Jacob Fennell, Facade.
This is the title for the talk that I am presenting at Seattle Dorkbot, October 6, 2010. 

Jigsaw Renaissance
1026 Madison Street
Seattle, WA, 98104
See map: Google Maps

Jacob Peter Fennell – Conceptual Concerns for the New Media Artist
The technologically minded artist has many avenues to create projects that initially awe and ‘wow’ the audience. However, many new media based projects cease to be interesting after the gimmick is discovered. Jake will speak about personal motivations to make technologically enabled installation art, and methods to create dynamic, memorable experiences.

Also presenting:
Brent Watanabe – Brent will discuss recent gallery installations that incorporate high tech components such as networked computers, custom applications, and video projection, with low tech elements such as the haunted house Pepper’s Ghost effect, mirrors, paper sculpture, and traditional pencil drawing.

Site Launch – A Troy Group


A Troy Group – Portland Architecture Firm site launch. Gavin Fiske is a licensed architect in Portland, OR. His site is made in both Flash and includes a full HTML counterpart. Design and programming by Jacob Fennell, FNL Design.

Site Launch

Site Launch! http://www.jacobfennell.com I am still working on a few sections, but we have lift-off! It has some selections of my work with images aplenty. I am continuing to put together some video documentation for a few of those projects. Prototype is going to be my blog of art reviews, happenings, and experiments. It will be activated later.

Be sure to contact me if you need an interactive programmer or content producer. I develop custom content management systems (Websites you can update yourself), games, Flash Actionscript, and animation / video.

Thank you for visiting! Well wishes upon you.