Consistently falling behind in something.

So I had planned to keep a blog about my progress from the beginning of the semester... but I ended up spending so much time working on everything, I didn't really blog at all. When it comes to my shifting emotional and mental states, that all got logged into facebook and my livejournal, but my thesis progress... fell through the documentary cracks.

I began the semester feeling really pumped - I'd spent all summer researching and thinking about my thesis. Then I hit a brick wall - it was all concept. I didn't have any idea what I was physically going to MAKE - just that it would involve text-based imagery. My materialization project was a cute rendition of a home sweet home sign rendered in embroidered line-based ASCII on a plush computer monitor. I liked it, but it wasn't REALLY what I was trying to say.

After hitting my head against that brick wall a couple times, I came up with the idea of dealing with the Avatar again, which was something I had tried to do in Eva's context in textiles class, and I hadn't felt that I'd accomplished what I had set out to.

As soon as I figured out that I would do a series of Avatar-replicating portraits of my online friends, it didn't take long to come up with how. Colour-based ASCII was the most ideal way to deal with it - then I could use a screenprint of the same text for every portrait. Binary code immediately came to mind because I've been trying very hard to make sure that even the non-nerd who knows nothing about computers knows that my work is about online living.

The Binary code I went with translates to "This is not who I really am. This is who I really am. Who am I really?" and repeats a couple times (do keep in mind that every letter, space and punctuation mark are represented by a string of 8 0's and 1's, a small statement is a very long string of binary code!).

At first I tried discharging dye from black cotton and repainting over each individual 0 and 1 with a colour to recreate VERY pixellated images. THIS TOOK FOREVER! I'd spend hours on just one... and after all that rigeur, I still haven't found a paint that will stay without fading on the discharge (details that I painstakingly painted in all but disappeared within 5 hours of drying).

Then I moved on to printing burn-out paste on silk/sating combinations as well as straight cotton. The Silk/Cotton Satin I used was what I expected to like most, but the burn-out was the most difficult to manage and the least transparent when all was said and done - these actually became my LEAST favourite portraits. I also worked with a rough chinese cotton, in which the burnout worked beautifully - creating a very lacy effect from the thick fabric. Last but not least I tried working with a very thin silk/cotton chiffon - which was already virtually transparent, but after the burnout was positively ready to fall apart.

I took the burned out fabrics and layed them over highly pixellated images I produced through paintshop pro manipulation, printing on thermoplastic polymer sheets (the forerunner for iron-on t-shirt transfers), and heatpressed them onto cotton. These layered images I then stretched onto 10"x10" frames.

I went with the square because the majority of online forums use that as the standard Avatar dimensions, as well as a couple other network sites like Livejournal and Facebook (the thumbnail versions of your profile pic are square).

I really loved the overall effect when I completed the first 9, but I feel I need to have a whole bunch more, to create a 'wall' of friends, like on those networking sites.